Posts Tagged ‘Smartphone’

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)

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What Is Your Attention Worth?

by on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Permission marketing requires marketers to obtain the consumer’s consent before delivering a marketing message (one that is relevant and timely, of course). It is the opposite of traditional interruption marketing, which is delivered whether whether the consumer likes it or not. Permission marketing was an answer to an increasingly cluttered messaging environment in which marketers competed with each other to communicate with consumers.

(via Zoutedrop - Creative Commons)

A new way of looking at the question of who gets to reach the consumer focuses on a different dimension: not clutter, but time. Marketers are competing with consumers for the right to communicate. Consumers can, as Joe Marchese of Social Vibe puts it, “‘outbid’ marketers for their own attention.” In other words, if their time is worth more than marketers are willing to pay for their attention, consumers may be willing to pay not not to be interrupted by marketing messages.

So, what is a consumer’s attention worth? Most consumers behave as if their time and attention in short supply – something that increases with income. This makes attention an increasingly scarce, and therefore pricey, commodity. A marketer’s ability to communicate a message to a consumer comes down to what that consumer thinks their time is worth. In one of his posts, Marchese uses the example of a marketer who effectively values attention to a 30-second pre-roll (the ads before a web site opens) at one cent per impression. Marchese suggests that since almost everyone values their time at more than $1.20/hour, most would pay the penny rather than sit through the ad.

We can see this with smartphone apps, which often are released in both “lite” and “full” versions. The lite version has most of the web application’s features, carries ads and is free. The full version contains the full feature set but no ads and is not free. It would be interesting to know how much of the purchase price consumers who buy the full version are mentally allocating to the added features and how much to the freedom from ads. Still, marketers are drawn to this business model because downloads of the “lite” versions are said to drive sales of the paid app.

Smaller marketers aren’t competing for consumers’ attention with TV spots and web site pre-roll. Frequently, they are using inherently cluttered media such as newspapers and directories. But regardless of the marketing channels they use, small marketers need to understand how difficult it is to capture and sustain consumers’ attention. With limited time, consumers’ will pick and choose from the messages that are out there, or may simply decide that it’s worth some money to enjoy content free of any messages.

How can smaller marketers compete for consumers’ attention? If there is a market for consumer attention, presumably the price fluctuates. Smaller marketers need to be nimble enough to take advantage of these price changes and bid for consumer attention only when the price goes down. When does that happen? Perhaps when the message can be linked with something with which the consumer has a positive association. The most obvious example is the Super Bowl, in which the interruption of the game is not only accepted but welcomed. When else might the price go down? Perhaps when the consumer is engaged in an activity that makes them feel good, or feel good about themselves. Smaller marketers that associate themselves with a charitable cause may be able to communicate marketing messages as part of the communications that relate to the cause. And perhaps when the “marketer” is actually a fellow consumer. This is one of the insights underling social shopping: that consumers will more readily accept, trust and act on messages from peers than from marketers.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Time is the commodity in short supply, so the competition for consumer attention is less with other marketers than with the consumer.
  • Consumers may outbid you for their own attention, even if they have to pay to make you go away.
  • The price of consumer attention constantly changes. Figure out when the price goes down and be nimble enough to seize the opportunity.

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Competition and Creativity

by on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Competition can bring out the best in marketers, or the worst. It can make them clever and creative, or literal and banal. When Verizon Wireless wanted to respond to AT&T’s iPhone-fueled growth, it promoted its advantage in network coverage with the “There’s a Map for That” campaign. When DirecTV wanted to respond to price competition from Dish Network and local cable providers, it created a campaign called “To Tell the Truth” that uses a game show format to claim that only DirecTV tells the truth about its pricing. Similar competitive challenges, but very different creative solutions.

There's a Map for That

The standard agency creative development process involves identifying a significant consumer insight, turning that insight into a relevant, credible claim and bringing the claim to life in a compelling and memorable way. Verizon’s insight was that a smartphone is only as capable as the network it runs on, and its claim was that its network has more coverage than AT&T’s. DirecTV’s insight was that consumers in this category are value-driven, and its claim was that it provides more channels for less money.

Both campaigns are from major agencies: McCann Worldgroup for Verizon and Deutsch for DirecTV. But while Verizon’s commercials make their point in a clever and engaging way, DirecTV’s spots are uninvolving and numbingly literal. One creative team was able to make the jump from Apple’s “There’s an app for that” to Verizon’s network coverage map to “There’s a map for that” while the other creative team got only as far as an old game show. In fact, one wonders whether DirecTV even bothered trying to be creative, or whether they thought that being literal was the best way to reach their audience.

Creativity is a particular challenge in online marketing. In Zavee’s Google advertising we have a very limited space in which to induce users to click, and every word is analyzed and evaluated. If we weren’t highly literal our ads might not even appear where we want them. Within the Zavee site and this blog, we try to use keywords that will improve our rankings in searches. Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization are absolutely vital to Zavee’s marketing plan, but they don’t result in much creativity. In fact, it sometimes feels like we are writing for Google, not for our audience.

One online medium where creativity doesn’t have to be sacrificed for effectiveness is YouTube. Many marketers have figured out how to create videos that pull the audience in, expose them to the marketer’s brand and get them talking about it with others. And some of the best YouTube videos are produced by consumers, not the marketer. Look for Zavee to make greater use of this medium in the near future.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Competition should make marketers more creative, not less.
  • SEO and SEM present challenges to creativity, but they aren’t the only online media.
  • YouTube is one online medium that rewards creativity.

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Paperless Business Cards (Really!)

by on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

If you’ve seen this commercial for the Apple iPhone you probably noticed two iPhones exchanging information by being bumped together. It’s an application called, reasonably enough, Bump. And it’s far from the only way to exchange contact information without using traditional business cards.

With so much innovation surrounding what has become known as the “Real Time Web” it isn’t surprising that someone came up with an online alternative to exchanging business cards. What may be surprising is how many alternatives are out there, and how quickly they have caught on with mainstream business users. For proof, look no further than this article on CNN.com, which claims that there are more than 20 such applications and takes a look at eight of them, including Bump.

We have been experimenting (OK, playing) with a couple of these applications and haven’t settled on one yet. We actually like Bump’s technology but we don’t like to think about what happens after an over-enthusiastic bump (hint: it’s not covered by insurance). beamME is another app that exchanges info using an iPhone. It lets you beam without the bump. And since we are talking about iPhone apps, the iPhone’s contact manager lets you share information via email or MMS – no third-party application required.

Awww!

Awww!

Our sentimental favorite is Poken, which is also mentioned in the CNN article. It isn’t very corporate-looking and has some technical hurdles to overcome but it’s a great conversation starter. It’s also a whole lot cuter than any business card we’ve ever seen. Will the Poken ever replace the business card here at Zavee? Probably not, but we just can’t keep our hands off the little pandas, ninjas and geishas.

Poken Pulse

Poken Pulse

Perhaps with a nod to that commercial reality, Poken has just come out with a product targeted to business users called the Pulse. It looks very stylish (if not as wildly adorable as the original) and we can’t wait to try one out. By the way, if you are interested in the Poken – or just want to see how a business can be built almost exclusively using social media – it’s worth checking out Poken Girl, a young entrepreneur who is a Poken distributor in South Florida.

So, trendy gizmo or the future of information exchange? Give some of these business card alternatives a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

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