One page ad in today’s Kompas newspaper: MORE – MObile Reward Exchange. Launched today at Grand Hyatt Jakarta. (Several previous news coverage: here, sales pitch in mail-archieve, KCM, and Jakarta Post through BBG)
If I can summarize it, the core concept is to aggregate all diverse loyalty programs from whatever club/supermarket/dept.store/restaurant into a single platform (or membership card, if you wish). It’s an any-to-any: points collected from any participating loyalty programs can be spent in any participating vendors. Plus, more importantly, do this on your mobile phone!
How do they make money? I don’t know exactly. Should be two-sided (getting money from the users and from the merchants/partners). My guess are at least:
- the cut/commission from each transaction through MORE platform
- advertisement
- database analytics
- selling top-up voucher for MORE points
Value for user (let’s not generalize, let’s take my case) to enroll in MORE?
- On the practical side, if MORE can replace all the different plastic membership cards, I will use it. Typically, it’s a dilemma: I kept forgetting to bring the correct card, thus always regretting that I pass a discount or a certain special offer. But, I don’t want to fill up my wallet with 10-20 cards. So…
- On the economical side, if I can collect rewards while spending money, why not?
- But the Chinese side of me also warns me not to be too excited: which one gives you more: the point rewards from MORE or from the other brand?
Value for the merchants (both the loyalty program owners and the vendors where we spent the reward points)?
Fundamentally, how does a loyalty program helps brand owner? (Has loyalty program became a hygiene factor instead of satisfaction factor?) How to maximize it?
Does MORE platform help you, as a product/brand owner, to roll out a meaningful loyalty program?
Is this kind of alliance/aggregation common? Or is it new? I know that we can exchange points between a certain credit cards and airlines for example. But across the whole spectrum? Is this a similar model to the “discount cards” issued by a certain publisher that gives you discount in participating stores (you have to “buy” the membership to the card). How about “mall patronage card”?
To tell you frankly, I have more questions than answers…. (I do hope I ask the right questions).
I do not know yet the economics of this reward points business. It seems to be a good and interesting business. But how is the business model? How to compete? How’s the value configuration? I think I need to talk to a few friends to pick up their brains on this thing
Nevertheless, it’s a good sign that the mobile telecommunication will continue to enrich retail business.
I have some screenshots of the application: here in Flickr.
And the application that I downloaded today still has a serious bug. I can’t browse my catalogue… how’s that? What’s wrong?
Every time I openned the catalogue, there is an error message: “There are invalid files. Do you want to delete?” Deleting the file will result an empty catalogue.
Update: I reinstalled the application: delete the application and all user data, download a new one (I think there’s a version update 1.03), install it in Phone memory (previously in SD Card). Success. This time the application can download the complete catalog and show it properly.
Head on to my/mobilemonday-id Flickr slideshow for new screenshots. Will add a new post to review the catalog.
