Let’s Meet! A participatory-based discovery and rendezvous mobile marketing framework

•A mobile marketing framework, coined Let’s Meet!, is proposed that puts emphasis on user’s privacy and security.•The system groups two or more people with the aim to bring them together, so that they can purchase and enjoy offers, which otherwise could not afford.•The system adopts a rating process, based on the users’ reliability.•A queuing system is implemented to increase efficiency and maximize the amount of offers sold.•Advanced and prospective technologies, such as that of Wi-Fi Direct, are utilized towards achieving a face-to-face meeting between the users and for redeeming a coupon.

Modern mobile devices are nowadays powerful enough and can be used toward defining a new channel of communication with potential consumers. This channel is commonly known as mobile marketing and there is already a number of mobile marketing apps, whose aim is to increase the sales of some product or service. In this context, the Let’s Meet! framework presented in this paper is essentially a mobile marketing app. The app groups two or more persons, who basically do not know each other, having as sole criterion their common interest in an offer about a product or a service. Its main objective is to bring them together, so that they can purchase and enjoy an offer, which otherwise could not afford. One of the highlights of our proposal is that all sensitive user data are transmitted in a secure manner, and thus confidentiality is preserved. Users’ privacy is also given great consideration. This means for example that the exact geographic locations of the users are never shared with others. For user authentication, Let’s Meet! supports both a complete anonymous mode and OAuth 2.0. The framework’s main objective, which is to bring the users together, is guaranteed by means of a one-time coupon, generated by the OCRA algorithm, while the final face-to-face user group meeting is achieved through Wi-Fi Direct technology. Moreover, the app implements a smart queueing system for increasing its efficiency. Every possible effort is made to maximize both the number of products being sold and the number of users that eventually enjoy an offer. Finally, a user rating system has been adopted, which rewards any user attitude that helps towards improving the framework’s competence. The above qualities make Let’s Meet! a novel proposal when considering similar works in the literature so far.