Do point of sale RFID-based information services make a difference? Analyzing consumer perceptions for designing smart product information services in retail business.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a hot topic in retail supply chain management [Behrenbeck, Küpper et al. 2004]. Yet, a recent study predicts "that the true benefits of RFID for retailers will be in enhanced marketing opportunities" [Sharpless 2005]. Research on RFID for marketing purposes is still rare giving the opportunity for more specific research on how RFID will influence business to consumer (B2C) marketing and services [Curtin, Kauffman et al. 2005]. Apparel retailing will most likely be one of the first industries to adopt item level tagging and thus benefit from those new marketing opportunities [Chappell, Durdan et al. 2003; Kurt Salmon Associates 2005]. This paper investigates the opportunities of RFID to enhance B2C marketing of apparel retailers. The paper presents six out of 17 developed RFID applications that support relationship marketing of apparel retailers to better recruit, retain, and recover customers. The RFID applications are classified by the marketing goals they fulfill and the marketing phase they support. The authors describe the use of each RFID application exemplified, and evaluate the additional value for the customer company relationship as well as the feasibility for apparel retailers to implement the application into practice.

For this paper we developed the concept and implemented a fully working prototype of a snowboarder community platform based on Near Field Communication. All-I-Touch is a service which provides product information at the point of sale and additionally connects the user with his social community in Facebook. Through this combination it is possible to increase incentives for the end user to use the service as well as the snowboard manufacturer to equip his products with NFC tags. The end user benefits from meaningful product information which is enriched with comments from his friends or arbitrary users through the connection to Facebook. This information is more likely to represent an independent impression of the product than the manufacturer's description and thus it is more valuable. On the other hand, manufacturers profit from All-I-Touch as a tool for Viral Marketing and benefit from a highly relevant target group. To enhance the attractiveness of the Facebook application we extended All-I-Touch to include Pieces, Places and People. Thus, the user can update his Facebook profile page instantly with information like where he has been and whom he met -and all that just by holding a mobile phone over a tag!

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In this paper, we describe a prototype that allows users to receive news on his NFC enabled mobile phone by touching a poster on the go.