Location Innovation

Questions to inspire innovation in Location Based Marketing
Location Innovation by Sheri Kaufmann

Positioning your brand for success
Brands are starting to experiment with location. But most initiatives are focused on delivering offers. While it’s great to get your coupon in the hands of a woman walking past a store, the bigger opportunity is to delight her by anticipating a need — by being there for her in the moment your brand can help make her life a little more convenient, interesting, or fun.  Marketers should begin thinking about how location data can help them reach consumers in new ways and create more meaningful brand experiences. This is a good time not only to learn, but also to innovate.

Here are a few questions to help spark ideas among your team.

1. If your brand were a person tagging along with a consumer, when and where would it speak up?

Think about places where people could benefit from your brand’s knowledge. How can you provide value by anticipating a need? Think about creating helpful services, not ads.
The North Face started using geofencing as a coupon-delivery mechanism, but has announced plans to evolve its alerts to include lifestyle info when people are in outdoor recreation area.
History Channel often rewards its followers on Foursquare when they check in with interesting facts about nearby historical sites.

2. How can we mash it up?

Think about potential brand partners who could enhance your location-related value proposition. Here are a couple “what ifs” to illustrate this kind of thinking.
What if a grocery store could trigger a person’s shopping list upon check in?
What if a bank populated a map to the closest ATM when someone checked into a restaurant that only accepted cash?

3. Can we make a game out of it?

Nike+ now offers a Tag game where people challenge their friends and view each other’s runs to determine, based on time and distance, who’s “it.” It’s a fun way to use peer competition to fuel running.
With the app EpicMix, Vail has layered a game into the skiing experience at its family of resorts. Devices installed throughout the lift system track chips embedded in ski badges so skiers can track real-time progress, unlock achievements, and share updates with friends. It differentiates Vail’s resorts by making a day of skiing a more fun and rewarding experience.

4. Can we use APIs from location apps to create compelling content?

Services like Foursquare allow you to pull data via API to create interesting new content or services. What interesting or fun utility could your brand create by curating this data?
Ratio Finder lets people view the average male/female ratios at local bars.
WhenShouldIVisit.com figured out that if Foursquare can tell you where people are, it can also tell you where they aren’t. Its app helps people figure out when London-area museums will be the least crowded.

5. How can your brand save the day (or at least the moment)?    

We have an unprecedented opportunity to intercept consumers just at the time a need arises. Make sure your brand is there at those times.
Tide’s Stain Brain already lets people find stain solutions wherever they are. If location-services were enabled, it could also potentially give them the shortest route to a store carrying Tide to Go, plus a coupon.

Look for what’s missing

This space is in its infancy. The killer apps in the location-based marketing space have not yet been defined. Right now, the opportunity to innovate is there for the taking. So think creatively. Get into the head of your consumer. Solve a problem that no one has figured out how to solve yet. Create a moment of delight. And if you have an idea that you think could be game changing, don’t be afraid to take a risk. This quote from The Innovator’s DNA sums it up nicely: “Innovators try things just to see if they work, while others want to know if they will work before they try them.”  Now is the time to innovate.

This piece is excerpted from Location Innovation by Sheri Kaufmann, which will be published in Digitas Cache vol. II Infinity. To read the entire article, download Digitas Cache II from the iTunes App Store after June 9.

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