Friday, June 10, 2011

Don't brands want to communicate transparently to the consumer?

Do you remember one of my earlier postings Brand owners loose sales due to mobile scanning?

Actually my main message was that brands have to invest into MDM to be able to publish their product information in a high quality way to all those app providers to have control over the branded product information publically available.

I thought that it is mainly a technical and effort issue!

But I had to learn that there are also other issues.

Last couple of days there was the SA2 Worldsync's Annual User Congress 2011where we promoted a lot the new mobile century. We had great presentations from the mobile space (eg. from Mirasense and from barcoo) which made it clear that there is a massive demand for extensive product information from the consumer. And those app providers are fulfilling this demand - either with or without the support from the brand owners.

We got quite some good feedback from some major brand manufacturers for our activities to deliver trusted, manufacturer product information to those platforms. See one of our press releases here.

But we also got quite some negative feedback from some other major brand manufacturers.

Quote: "That is not in our interest."

It is not in your interest to communicate with your customers?
It is not in your interest to provide correct and honest information to your customers?
It is not in your interest to use the new media?

One argument I heard was "We cannot give allergene information to the consumer via such platforms because then we could be held liable for it. And we could be sued if the data is incorrect and thereby somebody gets harmed.".

But you are putting allergene information on the packaging and on your website.

Are your processes so much more reliable for putting information on the packaging or on your website then publishing it to the GDSN?

Or are there other reasons behind your reluctancy to provide transparent information to the consumer?

Actually I haven't got it yet. I would be happy to get some feedback on that topic ...