Sunday, March 18, 2007

McDonald's and DoCoMo to jointly promote e-Marketing based on Osaifu-Keitai

The plan that McDonalds and DoCoMo have is to create joint company to manage the e-marketing promotions for the new McDonalds membership club. This club will be able to use their cell-phones as credit cards in McDonalds stores. This new membership club of McDonalds is planned to become active in October of 2007 in McDonalds stores in Japan. It will be available to members of the current membership club and McDonalds hopes that this new club will help to promote customer loyalty and offer enhanced membership services. The company will launch services using both McDonalds 1.4 billion annual customer base and DoCoMo's 52 million mobile phone subscribers. The company will be established around July 2007 and will be built with 30% of DoCoMo capital and 70% of McDonalds capital amounting to 300 million yen.

This idea sounds like it could potentially become a huge thing in America. The only problem that I see in this new partnership is the potential for a huge increase in debt. McDonalds is primarily a market of impulse buys. The idea that now consumers can purchase McDonalds even when they don't have any cash on hand, this has the potential to lead to huge bills each month and large sums of debt for frequent visitors to McDonalds. If this trend keeps up and spreads to all other areas of purchasing, it could mean an even higher increase in debt. Other than that problem I think that it will make things much easier, and alot more convenient.

1 comment:

Sally said...

I think this partnership could really change shopping in the future, making checkouts much easier and faster. I do also agree that it could increase debt and be harmful to consumers with little self control.