The problem with Foursquare and all the free coffees

I’m sorry, but someone had to say it. Am I the only one who’s a bit sick of hearing that xyz cafe/bar/restaurant is giving away free coffees to the mayor of their establishment?  The truth is it was great when the first few companies did it – used a brand new tool and an innovative way to reach their customers. It was quirky and fun. But then everyone else came along and did the same thing and sort of took the fun out of it.

This is great if you want to reach a (very small) portion of your customers with a nice offer using new technology. I don’t have a problem if companies want to do this, but the song and dance that’s being made around giving away a free coffee to your mayor is a little too much to take. The problem I have is not so much the fact that businesses are doing this, but this has unfortunately now defined companies ‘doing Foursquare’. It shows misguided thinking in that it’s the tool that makes you innovative, when it’s not. It’s what you do with it. I firmly believe that companies should be embracing an app like Foursquare, but I’d like to see it being used a bit more originally.

It was recently announced that two major brands in the UK were targeting their customers through Foursquare : Dominos and Debenhams. When I read the headline, I started to get excited. Big brands embracing what is still a new way to reach their consumers and taking full advantage of what Foursquare could do for them. Then I read that they were offering free pizza and coffee, respectively, to their mayors. Is this really the best that a major brand can do? I really hope not. Now it’s easy to see how this happened, a new free tool has come along – everyone’s using it and all you need to do to show your company is on board is to put a sign in your window to say ‘free coffee for all mayors’. 95% of your customers won’t know what you mean, but at least you’ve ticked the social media box and you can get on with your day.

Offering free coffees through Foursquare is nothing more than a gimmick. It is a tempting one because of the ease of use, but when you think about it, you’re only rewarding one or two of your super-loyal customers anyway. Great if that’s your aim, but you can be sure that most companies want to do more than this with their marketing efforts. If you really think that Foursquare is the one for you, I’m not suggesting that you don’t use it for fear of appearing to jump on the bandwagon, but to warn you that offering a free coffee isn’t pushing any boundaries and isn’t using the app to it’s full capabilities. In social media things gets old fairly quickly and I really think we’ve reached the saturation point for free stuff for mayors.

What is encouraging is that Foursquare are interested in aligning themselves with brands : they’re actively pursuing it. Again though this seems to be focused around the ‘free stuff’ initiative. I know we all like free stuff, but we also like to have fun. What about rewards for recruiting a mayor of Burger King to become mayor of your Macdonald’s franchise? What about setting challenges for your customers? Unlocking special badges for visiting different outlets of your store? Or if it really does need to be free stuff, then how about spot prizes for everyone that checks in within a certain period?

Warner Bros are going about it in the right way, with a promotion for their Valentine’s Day movie that encourages you to check in to romantic spot. This actually creates a bit of fun and a challenge around the app, outside of rewarding people for where they were checking in anyway. I hope this is the kind of space Foursquare moves into more and I hope that we see more brands doing amazing things with the app beyond a free coffee or doughnut.