Knovolo Mobile Marketing Reviews

Taco Bell Thinks ‘Outside the Bun’ with its Mobile Experience

While enjoying a couple of supreme tacos today at Taco Bell, I was delighted to find two supreme mobile call-to-actions:

1 | The first was a flyer advertising jobs at Taco Bell. It had a QR code which, once I scanned it, took me to a page about jobs and careers at TBell. This page looked pretty good on my MyTouch, and featured a video which played nicely.
The job search feature worked quite well, and it was very good that they added a link to the full site in case you somehow ind yourself in the mobile version on your computer.

They also provided a web address to enter – this is crucial because many mobile users aren’t familiar with QR codes yet. It was confusing, however, that the web address they spelled out, www.tacobell.com/careers, isn’t the same one that the QR code points to. In fact, once you land on www.tacobell.com/careers with your mobile, you get directed to m.tacobell.com, their mobile homepage, and since there’s no link about careers, it’s a dead-end. This means that non-QR code users can NOT actually get to the career content, which isn’t happy.

2 | Next, I spotted an SMS (text message) call-to-action on my cup. This user experience wasn’t quite as seamless as the last recruitment flyer, but was functional nevertheless. The code was long and tedious to enter on a mobile phone and the text message responses were very technically worded and lacked the pzazz of the wording on the cup, but overall it functioned just fine. Perhaps I’d have been happier if I’d actually won something.

Room for Improvement

The mobile landing page was a little too wide for my screen and created the need to scroll sideways just to see the whole thing.

There was no other way than scanning the short code to get to career link on a mobile.

To do a job search, I had to enter my city or zip code. Why not also have the option of using my GPS to determine my location? It’s a fair bet that if I’m looking at the flyer, I’m probably standing in the part of the world where I’m interested in working.

Takeaway

Overall, I was quite impressed with Taco Bell’s mobile efforts: they appear to be at the forefront of eateries as far as mobile marketing & mobile engagement is concerned. There are certainly a few things they could improve upon, but the webpages were mobile-optimized, and everything worked, which is more than you get with many of today’s mobile efforts.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Taco Bell will continue to think outside the bun.