Many people frequent the same coffee shop or breakfast spot on the way to work each day, and many are left with wallets full of stamp cards, and relatively minimal rewards for every 10 items purchased. In a move that combines the physical and digital realms, an app called Belly merges these cards into a digital wallet of sorts, a rewards program on your phone. The premise is simple: many new stores use iPads as cash registers, with the prominence of services like Square encouraging the move away from traditional registers. As such, Belly presents each of their users a unique QR code within the app that’s readable via the store’s iPad’s front-facing camera. Once the unique QR code is scanned Belly registers that the user made a purchase, and adds points to that user’s tally which can be redeemed, much like stamp cards, for real-world rewards.
What’s so special about Belly, though, is that it combines real-world, tangible, everyday rewards, while combining a simple piece of new technology to streamline a user pain-point, while encouraging brand engagement by allowing users to share their rewards across their social and digital networks. At the same time, Belly provides a map of shops that use the service, encouraging active users to build rewards within the app. It also seems likely that those with Belly would be incentivized not only to use the map to find stores, but to use the app in conjunction with the map to build up rapport with brands and brick-and-mortar establishments that they might otherwise pass up.
Where we’ve seen apps that look to reward mobile users in specific moments, Belly is one of the only apps that looks to create and establish long-term brand loyalty, in addition to allowing brands the creativity to create quirky rewards of their own, creating positive feedback loops of loyal shoppers. It’s not only a useful app, but a very forward-thinking method of thinking through consumer loyalty and brand interactions.
