Docomo Coin is a new promotion scheme that lets you earn ‘coins’ when you visit participating i-mode sites and campaigns on your cell phone. These coins are worth 1 yen each and can be saved up and then used to pay your phone bill.

The user registers with the service, creating a ’savings account’, and then when visiting participating sites, coins are automatically added to this account without any further action. The user can then have the equivalent amount of money deducted from their next phone bill.

The service is just a simple reward scheme, however, because it is being run by the network operator – Docomo – the points system can be applied by many different sites and so a whole host of companies can take advantage of the incentive for their marketing.

This is a standardised scheme, with a real, tangible reward and will provide benefit for the network – generating more traffic; benefit for the partner companies – incentive to visit their content and fill in questionnaires; and benefit for the user by giving them money off their cell phone bill.

At the same time, this is not going to wipe out the more traditional promotions, which tend to offer more interesting gifts, and it won’t put off more innovative campaigns which, by there nature, assuming they are successful, entice the user in more interesting and novel ways.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Innovation, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.