Analyst Roundtable: Keeping Up with Mobile: Starbucks, Burger King and Google
Burger King, Starbucks and Paypal all announcing different mobile payment upgrades or features that let you order in advance and skip the line, key advancements in mobile payments that we predicted in our mobile payments insight paper.
And Google has made two announcements in this past week that has the potential to disrupt local mobile advertising in an interesting way. The first announcement took place last week with Google announcement of Android Wear and the second was yesterday’s announcement of Google Now launching on the Chrome browser for desktop and laptop browsers.
BIA/Kelsey senior analyst Mike Boland and associate analyst Meshach Cisero conferred around these two mobile topics today on the latest in our ongoing Analyst Roundtable series.
Boland began the conversation by noting that “Starbucks has been a leader in mobile payments.” He then outlined the upgrades of the new mobile payment upgrades and features which included easier point-of sale transactions such as tipping your barista and the biggest upgrade was the ability to order in advance.
Boland also stated Burger King also released a similar feature — to help consumers get their Whoppers faster. Boland says this is important because it allows users to have a personalize portal and provides a lot more convenience. Boland did mention while this is an advancement in mobile payments for Starbucks, it’s a brand new service from Burger King. Boland also goes on to say these apps open the door to a lot of potential ways to interact with customers such as loyalty programs.
Next, Cisero shared his thoughts on the recent announcement of Android Wear and Google Now for Desktop.
“Google has the potential to disrupt local mobile advertising in an interesting way,” Cisero said referring to yesterday’s announcement of Google Now migration to desktop. Previously the service was only available to smart phone users. However, now the service is going to allow you to sync the services between all devices. Google Now on the desktop seems to be only a supplement of the mobile version but it would appear to me that google has a more robust plan of building it out to get a more holistic view of a users computing behavior.
The big question is will consumers actually buy these smart watches? Cisero strongly believes that this is Google’s strategy to bring wearable tech to the mass market. He highlighted Google’s efforts to incorporate style and functionality by partnering with companies like Fossil.
Check out the video below for today’s Analyst Roundtable in its entirety.