Have you tried using vending machine to send a gift?

by chee Leng (on coffee makers)
(Singapore)

Have you? I would be surprised if you have used a vending machine to send a gift, the technology was not available then.

But now, with Pepsi Social vending machine system -you can! About a year ago, Coca Cola introduces a touch screen interactive vending machine.

Now, Pepsi take the competition one level up -it allows you to send a Pepsi or their brand of soft drinks to any of your love ones!

Basically, Pepsi vending machine is a touch screen similar to Coke, but with enhance features of sharing a drink with a friend.

By keying in that feature, it allows you to send a code to anyone, allows you to write and even record a message. The gift is send via sms.

Once you friend receives it, all that need to do is to redeem it at the nearest Pepsi vending machine using the code that comes with the SMS.

While this might sound a bit far stretched to some of you, this might be the beginning of a merge between the offline and the online.

Clearly, Pepsi is taking advantage of the social media frenzy currently by allowing people to "gift a drink" to their friends.

Who knows, there might even be social media components on the vending machine moving forward.

The idea is cool and you might be able to scale it up to bigger marketing campaign but the logistics need to be there.

Firstly, there must be enough Pepsi Social vending machine around in order for you to send and redeem the drinks.

And we are talking about tens of thousands of them even in a small place like Singapore. And by installing and changing the current fleet of machines might be too capital intense for even a big company like Pepsi.

My $0.02.

If I would to go social, I would be using current technology instead of changing all the hardware. For example, if I want to let Pepsi drinkers share a drink, I would be using QR code instead.

Here is what I would do:

1. Update the current hardware slightly by installing a QR reader and a trigger to vend. For example, when the QR code read an affirmative code about a drink, it would vend the drink.

2. Allow drinkers to purchase or share the QR codes on Pepsi Facebook, twitter and linkedIN pages. This improves the social and viral of the message.

Overall, this would be as capital intense and it is using mostly current resources.

Anyway, here is the video on the Pepsi vending machine works: