Samsung’s recent announcement of its incentive program to promote use of Samsung Pay among its users underlines the difficulty universal mobile wallet providers are encountering in creating new habits in the grooved behavior around transactions we engage in daily.
The promotion site for the deal focuses on the fact that the free gift card offer is only for people who have already registered for Samsung Pay before the offer begins on Friday, but who have not yet used the service. This is clearly meant to encourage people to actually use Samsung Pay for the first time.
Because Samsung is rewarding these specific users to try the scheme, it is likely that it will only serve as an introduction, and there will be limited actual change in payment behavior by those that take advantage of the $30 gift card offer. There have been studies indicating it takes an average of 66 days for ingraining a new behavior.
Crafting an incentive plan mimicking successful merchant mobile wallet schemes would be one possible strategy for universal mobile wallets to employ to gain traction. To learn more about some of the stand out merchant mobile wallet programs working in the U.S., see Mercator Advisory Group’s report Merchant Mobile Wallets: Mobile Payments in Action.
Overview by Joseph Walent, Senior Analyst, Emerging Technologies at Mercator Advisory Group
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