As it happens, I forgot the chicken (yes I know the recipe uses shrimp, but we like chicken instead) and had to go back to the store to get it.

Now, you might know that three of my interests are marketing, labeling & barcoding and mobile technology – the things I do for a living. You will imagine I was very pleased to see all three things being used on one of the chicken products – the one from Springer Mountain Farms. Needless to say, this is the one I bought.

The packages of chicken breast have a big datamatrix barcode printed on them, with an invitation to scan to get a discount or a free ringtone – there seemed to be several different versions. The only problem was that I had to charge my iPhone (if you’re an iPhone owner you’ll know this happens rather often) so I couldn’t scan any codes in the store – no problem, I hurried home with my new purchase.

So I grabbed the phone (which hadn’t charged because I’d forgotten to plug the USB cable into the PC) and tried to read my barcode. Try as I might, with two different barcode apps, I couldn’t get the barcode to decode. Very disappointing .

By this time one of Em’s friends had arrived and they were getting hungry – my experiments had to stop because we needed to cook the chicken.

Anyway, this morning it was off to the Springer Mountain website where I was able to scan one of the Datamatrix codes on the screen and be taken to their mobile site.

I must say that even though I wasn’t able to read the barcode on the actual package (and to be fair the iPhone is a terrible barcode scanner so that might be the problem) I love this marketing concept. It has been around in markets where mobile technology is more advanced, such as Europe and Asia for a while, so it is great to see it being used here.

All I need to do now is get back to the store with my iPhone and see if I can read any of the barcodes. Failing that, I’ll try with a proper scanner from the office.

Gotta love the SmartCar too!

What do you think? Do you have any experience of using mobile devices in consumer marketing?

Related posts:

1. Marketing in the AIDC business
2. $50/Month Marketing Program: Part I