A Secure Solution for a Blockchain-Based Consortium Promotional Scheme

Abstract

Promotional schemes, such as promotional points and coupons, are highly effective marketing tools. Through these schemes, merchants can obtain customer loyalty or attract new customers, and customers can obtain benefits when purchasing goods or services. Therefore, the use of promotional schemes is considered to be a win-win strategy. Promotional points are becoming an increasingly popular way of providing customers with discounts or gifts to incentivise the purchase of some products. However, some security issues should be addressed: forgery, double-spending, privacy, etc. Blockchain is gaining popularity in academic research and business applications, as it has the potential to change business models in numerous sectors of the economy. The characteristics of blockchain (security, immutability, efficiency, etc.) can help to provide secure solutions for blockchain-based applications in the marketing field. In this paper, we propose a multimerchant, blockchain-based promotional point scheme that allows points to be transferred between customers and preserves customers’ privacy.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• promotional scheme
• loyalty points
• e-coupons
• distributed ledger
• fair exchange