Posts Tagged ‘Location-Based Applications’

A Look at the Future of Location-Based Marketing

by on Friday, November 19th, 2010

Bill Hanifin of Loyalty Truth (and a friend of Zavee) was kind enough to point me toward the Location-Based Marketing Summit held recently in New York. Bill thought it would be worth my while and, as usual, he was right.

Although the conference organizers were interested in what comes next for location-based marketing, most of the speakers were oriented toward the here and now. I came away from the conference with a far greater understanding of the uses and limitations of the current technologies and platforms while getting a grasp on some of what lies just over the horizon in the location-based space.

The Wise Marketer, a leading UK-based site for forward-thinking marketers, asked Bill to provide a write-up on the conference. Bill’s report, with which I assisted, was first published in The Wise Marketer for this week and is reprinted below:

The conference blended strategic and tactical insights about location-based marketing techniques, and most of the speakers observed that this branch of mobile marketing is still in its infancy. The principal strategic focus of the conference, however, was on consumer engagement and how to increase it.

Several speakers referred to Forrester’s recent finding that regular use of the ‘check in’ model was still in single-digit percentages, and that consumer awareness of these services wasn’t much higher – a report that has however been disputed at least once.

Either way, with estimates of more than 12 million people playing what consumers will initially consider “the location game”, smartphone penetration reaching 9% of the handset market, and SMS usage covering 95% of all wireless customers, it is clear that almost all consumers can be reached with marketing messages via a mobile handset.

Ian Schafer, CEO for Deep Focus, discussed ways in which marketers could use the technique for more effective marketing, suggesting that it can grow customer loyalty, increase relevance, and provide useful data and insights. He considers the smartphone to be “the next generation loyalty card”, with targeted deals and discounts being available upon check-in (or perhaps even without a digital check-in). By way of example, he highlighted ShopKick, which has a hardware platform that pushes reward currency to the consumer as soon as they enter the merchant’s store (without the consumer even having to check-in or make a purchase).

Android Phone

Android Phone (by Johan Larsson - Creative Commons)

Most of the speakers, including Schafer, took it as read that delivering more relevant marketing messages increases their effectiveness. And, in a highly fragmented communications environment, the relationship between relevance and effectiveness is even more essential.

Overall, it was agreed that location-based applications can at least provide:

  • People – other users who might have something in common with the user;
  • Content – messages or offers based on what the user likes that is at/near her location;
  • Time and Place – targeted, timely messages or offers based on where the user is right now;
  • Context – communications based on prior behaviour, as tracked by the location-based device.

The potential of location-based data is that it can drive better business decisions by adding additional dimensions (i.e. time and place, captured over time in real-time) to what is otherwise known about each consumer’s behaviour. One great example cited was the Microsoft Bing ‘Home Turf Finder’ for the World Cup, which identified certain bars in New York City as “home turf” for fans of a particular team. The determinations were based in part on editorial sources such as Thrillist, but were mostly derived from ‘heat maps’ of consumers who had checked in or tweeted their support as well as their location.

Several speakers also noted Google‘s recent announcement that 30% of mobile searches and 20% of all internet searches have local intent, and said that all of the major players (e.g. Facebook, Google, and even wireless carriers) were already focusing on local information.

There was also considerable discussion of ‘Groupon’, although some panellists expressed doubts that the “deep discount, deal of the day” model provides sustainable customer growth. Speakers agreed, however, that geo-targeting adds value by increasing both relevance and personalisation. And, in order to thrive, it was agreed that location-based applications must provide the consumer with something of value, preferably in terms of relevant and personalised content.

Overall, panellists agreed that there is great demand for marketers to engage with consumers at “the right place and the right time, all the time”. Mobile couponing, despite being a fragmented space, seems to have taken hold. As a result, one area in which technological developments are anticipated is indoor navigation, where GPS signals are sometimes degraded and are not designed to be accurate enough for navigation within a store.

Finally, the issue of consumer privacy arose in almost every session. John Nicholson of law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman concluded that “the more value a marketer delivers, the more information a consumer is likely to share”, and that an application that seems to exist only for marketing purposes is unlikely to gain the consumer’s trust.

(Article copyright 2010 The Wise Marketer)

0 comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

4 Things I Just Learned About Location-Based Marketing

by on Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

As someone who enjoys – but doesn’t completely get – Foursquare and other “check-in” services on the Web, I was looking forward to the Location-Based Marketing Summit I attended last week in New York. I learned a great deal about this rapidly-growing field, and I had the chance to hear and speak with some of the people who are responsible for the latest thinking and most interesting developments in location-based services (LBS) and their application to marketing. Here are some of the things I learned at the conference:

via jorgempf (Creative Commons)

Check-in is only the beginning. Services such as Foursquare and Gowalla have received so much publicity lately that it’s easy to equate LBS with check-in. But LBS also includes maps and other query-based services (imagine wandering through a museum and using your mobile device to learn about the painting you’re standing in front of) and a variety of shopping platforms (mostly deals and discounts but also several loyalty platforms) as well as socially oriented services like Foursquare. What can LBS do for marketers? At least three things:

  • Grow loyalty. Some marketers, such as Tasti-D-Lite, are using LBS as a loyalty platform, where a purchase results in an automatic “check in” and a message to friends as well as an award of loyalty points. A new service called TopGuest drives enrollment in hotel loyalty programs by offering bonus points when a guest checks in (in the LBS sense).
  • Increase relevance. Adding time and place to any information increases its relevance. And almost any kind of information can be made more valuable by adding relevance. Location data can tell marketers about what people like to do and to buy, and when and where they like to do it. It can place consumer behavior in context: Is going to Starbucks after the gym the same as going there on the way to work? Is going to Starbucks because it’s convenient the same as going there because you like it? With more detailed and relevant information about the consumer, marketers can create messages and offers that are much more relevant to the consumer – and more likely to be acted on.
  • Provide data. Marketers also can use aggregated location data to make better decisions. Comcast, which uses Twitter as a customer service channel, has been mapping tweets as a way to learn where service resources are needed most and communicate with customers in those areas. Location data can also be used to map patterns of customer behavior, from which bars attract fans of what teams to which doctors are prescribing what medications.

Engagement is everything. The hype about check-in services has obscured the wide variety of location-based services that are already available. The common denominator among them is engagement. How can LBS create engagement? One way is to deliver relevant information delivered in real time. Or, as one speaker called it, earning attention by being in “the right place, right time, all the time.” Another source of engagement is providing an enjoyable experience, such as by including game mechanics. On a superficial level this is how the check-in services work. But the real value of these services is relevance: for avid users, where their friends are and what they are doing right now matters. Another way to create engagement is financial: location-based shopping services that provide deals and discounts certainly have an audience.

Local is next. It’s easy to think of LBS as the province of large marketers, and it’s true that large marketers are better able than small ones to take the risk of jumping into LBS early. However, many of the speakers (and attendees) at the conference were talking about local applications. Why? One reason may be that, according to Google, one-third of mobile searches and 20% of all searches have local intent. That’s a big audience to overlook, and with the cost of technology decreasing, local marketers have a chance to engage with them using a location-based platform. Although local use of LBS is still in its early stages – for one thing, awareness of and interest in LBS is thought to be low among local marketers – look for substantial growth in this sector. And look for Zavee to be right in the middle of things.

Privacy is a transaction. This was one of the most eye-opening insights of the entire conference. No speaker disagreed that consumer privacy concerns were a legitimate issue for LBS and the marketers who use them. Several speakers, for example, were critical of Facebook for being insufficiently sensitive to users’ privacy concerns. But every speaker who discussed privacy at any length made the same point: While a service that exists only to push marketing messages will always have a privacy problem with consumers, a service that delivers a genuine benefit will find consumers more likely to share private information. The greater the benefit, the greater the sharing. This only works, of course, if consumers know what they are being asked to share – a potential issue with some advertising programs. All of the speakers at this conference, however, emphasized the need for LBS to be transparently opt-in with an easy way to opt back out. It will be very interesting to see, over the next several years, whether this transactional notion of privacy reflects consumer behavior or whether there are certain bright lines that no LBS can safely cross.

This has been a busy few weeks but our conference-going isn’t over: Zavee CEO Alan Pleskow and I are off to California for the Rise of Social Commerce Conference in Palo Alto – expect a post about it next week.

0 comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Using Social Media for Marketing Research

by on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Bill Hanifin always poses the interesting questions every marketer should be asking – but might not be. In a recent post, Bill asks, “How do we gain insight into the customer preferences that drive purchase decisions?”

That’s almost a rhetorical question, because there many marketing research techniques available; Bill skewers discusses them in his post. Bill’s really fascinating question is, “How can we re-engineer our methods of collecting attitudinal data from consumers?” Bill proposes some ways in which Social Media can be part of the answer, and I’d like to suggest some others.

Lifestyle Boards/Moodboards/Market Research via designandtechnologystudentSome very quick background: Researchers use both quantitative and qualitative measures to figure out what consumers want and what makes them buy. Quantitative tools, such as telephone surveys, use statistical principles to draw inferences about a large group from the responses of a random sample of that group. However, they are subject to all sorts of bias (usually unintentional) that can affect the validity of the data. Online surveys are particularly tricky, since their self-selected sampling can never be truly random, which means they aren’t as quantitative as they might appear.

Qualitative tools, such as focus groups, don’t provide the comfort of statistics, but instead are intended to produce insights by probing more deeply into the motivations of consumers. This can get marketers to think in new and different directions. Although our experience with focus groups and other qualitative tools was very successful, they can be compromised by the small number of participants, the group leader’s personality, bias and skill, and by personalities within the group. Whether quantitative or qualitative, however, the data never “speaks for itself.” It’s always subject to interpretation, and sometimes to wishful thinking and oversimplification.

Social Media opens up a world of possibilities for marketing researchers, agencies and marketers. Several characteristics of Social Media tools make them ideal for provoking creative thinking and producing insight:

  1. Penetration. Although it is not equally dispersed across age, education and income cohorts, access to Social Media is extensive and growing, even among older consumers.
  2. Speed. Social Media can be used quickly – almost in real time on mobile devices.
  3. Opt-in. Social Media is inherently permission-based. This may not make it easier to find a random sample for an online survey, but it does make it easier to find consumers who will share their opinions, insights and experiences because they want to rather than because – as in the case of focus groups – they are being paid and fed.
  4. Location-based. Social Media is increasingly being integrated with location-based applications. Location is a variable that does not exist for most focus groups, which usually take place in dedicated facilities.
  5. Interactivity. Social Media is … social. The interactions among participants in a focus group frequently are the most valuable part of the group. Social Media facilitates similar interactions on a vast scale.

How could researchers leverage these attributes? Here are a couple of ideas, all of which are qualitative in nature:

  • Discussions on Facebook pages. Marketers could start conversations on issues that range from very concrete questions, such as opinions on new packaging ideas, to strategic issues such as potential line extensions. Consumers also would be able to launch their own discussions, which the company could either moderate or simply monitor.
  • Scheduled conversations on Twitter. Marketers could use Twitter as an extension of the conventional focus group. Many more voices could be heard over the same period of time than with a typical group.
  • Location-based feedback. Suppose a large restaurant chain wanted a snapshot of server performance during the lunch rush, or a retailer wanted to evaluate restocking at every mall-based store. Consumers could check in at each location and provide real time feedback, including photos and video. This would provide data from a much larger, more varied and possibly more knowledgeable group than mystery shoppers, at a fraction of the cost.
  • Consumer-generated video. Focus groups rarely depart from a conversational model. But it might be very useful for consumers to shoot videos in response to specific solicitations by the marketer. “Make your own commercial” campaigns are a start in this direction, although to be valuable the campaign should encourage consumers not to be constrained by the company’s current marketing.
  • Meetups/Tweetups. Marketers could use Social Media as the nexus for live meetings with consumers. Moderators could ask questions of the group, which could be responded to with live Tweets.

I am sure that others can come up with further – and doubtless better – ideas. These techniques are likely to be low in cost, but they definitely have some kinks or at least raise some issues. For one thing, all research involving Social Media takes place in the open. This is not always a problem but if keeping the subject of the research away from competitors is a priority, the research is not a good candidate for Social Media. Second, there is no way to control – or even verify – the composition of the participants. A marketer who wants specific cohorts represented in a focus group will not be satisfied with Twitter-based groups. However, this lack of control doesn’t have to be a bad thing, if it’s dealt with creatively. For example, a marketer of adult diapers might be tempted to decide against using a Twitter-based focus group because Twitter users are too young; but men in their 20s may have valuable insights into a product that is marketed to women over 60. They have grandparents, after all, and their perspective on their grandparents’ experience with the product might be very valuable.

The discussion above involves using Social Media qualitatively. However, it may be possible to use Social Media for quantitative purposes. According to the Los Angeles Times, a team of researchers at HP Labs has developed a computational model that uses the volume of tweets about a movie and their overall sentiment about the film to predict its box office performance over its first two weeks of release better than any other standard measure. The rationale for this result is completely beyond me, but if the methodology stands up, and the results can be replicated in other areas, we may have to rethink what we mean when we say we are looking for statistically significant results.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Marketing research is both art and science, and it influences decisions that affect all of us.
  • Social Media is expanding the range of marketing research techniques, usually while reducing costs.
  • If you think marketing research might be right for your business but the expense has kept you away, try to find a research firm that uses Social Media. You might have to make some compromises on methodology, but you may learn a lot more than you expect.

0 comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Zavee’s First Featured Merchants

by on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

It doesn’t seem very long ago that Zavee existed solely in our developer’s test environment. But we have been up and running for a while now, working out the inevitable kinks and fixing the kinds of “what were we thinking?” mistakes that customers can spot in a heartbeat.

One of the things that is working well is our merchant search capability. Every Zavee user – merchant, shopper and cause – is precisely geo-located, so Zavee can center a search on a specific shopper and display the merchants within a true radius. This capability lets us do a lot of interesting things. One thing we can do is promote merchants to shoppers based on distance.

Our new “Featured Merchants” capability, which we are introducing this week, highlights specific merchants for a week at a time. However, to keep relevance and interest high, shoppers will see only those Featured Merchants within the radius they specify. In other words, shoppers in Fort Lauderdale will see a different list of Featured Merchants than shoppers in West Palm Beach.

This week’s crop of Featured Merchants provides a wonderful cross-section of the forward-thinking merchants who have joined Zavee:

Minuteman Press in Boca Raton is a full color commercial printing house that can produce a wide variety of printed materials, from brochures and catalogs to corporate letterhead and business cards to signs and banners. Minuteman is one of the few South Florida printers with the expertise to operate the world-renowned Heidelberg line of full-color presses.

Custom Vision Care in West Boca specializes in the most advanced techniques and technologies create a customized visual rehabilitation program for every patient. Above and beyond conventional lenses and treatments, Dr. Marotte and his staff maximize patients’ visual efficiency, visual comfort and safety. Visit Dr. Marrotte for a personal eye exam and visual needs consultation.

Ultra Cleaners Pointe at Wellington Green is the west county location of one of South Florida’s premier dry cleaners. Ultra Cleaners is continually improving its processes, investing in new state-of-the art equipment, and constantly recruiting skilled employees. Not near Wellington? Search on Zavee to locate Ultra’s other convenient locations.

Jimmy’s Bistro is one of the best-kept secrets in Delray’s exciting restaurant scene – but it won’t be a secret for long. The owner, Jimmy, has a resume that would be the envy of any chef in Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale or Miami. Jimmy worked in New York for 10 years at world-class restaurants such as Aureole and Le Chantilly. He also is one of the few American chefs in South Florida who worked for a year and a half at some of leading restaurants in Paris, including famed brasserie Zephyr and trendy bistro La Robe et le Palais.

Coral Springs Flowers & Events has supplied flowers and floral arrangements for some of the area’s most elegant events. With an outstanding reputation for the freshest products and the most creative concepts, Corals Springs Flowers & Events should be at the top of the list for everyone who is looking for a high-end floral solution.

Coral Springs-based David Seidner, P.T., D.C. says, “You’re in pain, I can help.” As the only dual-licensed doctor in all of South Florida with professional medical expertise as both a Physical Therapist as well as Chiropractic physician he can assure you that you will receive extraordinary treatment and care supported by the most advanced equipment and technology.

Located in North Lauderdale, A.S.E. Car Care Specialists is a complete auto repair facility. A.S.E. technicians can handle not just the usual tire repairs and oil changes but are fully qualified to perform complete engine rebuilding and electrical rewiring and repair. Wonder where the “A.S.E.” name comes from? Every one of their mechanics is certified by the prestigious National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence.

From fires to floods, ServiceMaster Clean by Robinson is Broward County’s disaster recovery specialist. Based in Fort Lauderdale but willing to travel anywhere, ServiceMaster Clean operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to insure timely disaster restoration response to restore your home or get your business back in business!

Watch for more new features and capabilities coming soon!

0 comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,