5 companies to test mobile coupons at grocery chain

Five companies are teaming up with grocery retailer The Kroger Co. to revive coupon redemption by rolling out mobile coupons. The Procter & Gamble Co., The Clorox Co., Del Monte Corp., Kimberly-Clark Corp. and General Mills Inc. will begin a four-month test sometime this spring to determine how consumers will react to using wireless coupons.

Users will download a mobile-marketing application from San Jose-based Cellfire Inc. to their cell phones, enabling coupons from the companies to be stored directly on their wireless devices.

The companies want to reach consumers in the 25-year-old-to-34-year-old age range, because this group includes young families who might need baby supplies, home-cleaning and household products, but who also don't use traditional paper coupons.

"The key objective for this test is to find out who are the people who actually would use a mobile for [these types of] transactions," said Tai Doong, director of digital marketing at Del Monte Foods. Doong declined to discuss how much the program would cost Del Monte.

While in a Kroger store, shoppers can use their phones as virtual shopping lists. If a shopper finds a coupon he wants to use, he selects it from his cell phone and the discount information is sent to Kroger's computer system, which identifies the shopper by his loyalty-card number. The discount is then applied when the shopper presents the loyalty card at checkout. Once the coupon is used or expires, it is automatically deleted from the consumer's phone and savings card to prevent overredemption, Cellfire said.

"Mobile/paperless is a winning combination," said Roger Entner, senior vice president of the communications sector at New York-based IAG Research. "You have quite a dedicated group of people who love to get coupons and a bargain, and this makes it pretty straight forward for people to get their coupons."