Placecast Teleconference, Mobile and Retailers
I listened in on the Placecast teleconference yesterday, talking about mobile technology driving retail foot traffic. There were some interesting points brought up during the discussion, a few of the most relevant:
- Consumer don’t mind giving away location as long as they get something valuable in return and they gave permission
- Texting is replacing emailing among the younger generation. Like receiving commercial email, receiving commercial texts is not seen as an intrusion as long as it was relevant and consumer gave permission
- In terms of ad delivery, location provides increased relevance… interestingly no one mentioned the consumer predisposition for acting on advertising when out and about… which I think is probably most important
- Going off and building an iPhone app is not for everyone. It’s expensive ($100k is not atypical) and overall smartphone penetration is not at scale. It makes sense for some demos more than others. Good old SMS is cheaper, easier and already at scale.
With respect to mobile meets retail specifically one of the panelists Kathryn Koegel from Primary Impact Research made mention of how consumers were often using mobile devices while IN STORE to get additional product information and reviews and to do price comparisons on the items they were shopping for. On a number of occasions I’ve found myself standing in the aisle at Best Buy, pulling up a browser on my phone trying to find out more about a product that I am standing in front of, so I get it. It was interesting to see that I am not alone and that this was a potentially unique way to use mobile hyper local marketing more from a customer service perspective than pure lead generation.
It made me think that there is a great opportunity for someone to create a network of individual retail store level mobile sites (via either a geo fence around the physical store, or via a wi-fi access point within store) optimized for the in store customers experience… to aid in finding additional product info, reviews, price comparisons, learn about sales, leave feedback for the manager, etc?
Someone like Foursquare very effectively uses gaming mechanics to get folks to just identify that they’re at a place. But it seems that a mobile retail presence portal targeted to in store customers could get you location (at Best Buy) + intent (looking at reviews of big screen TVs) and potentially intercept some of the high value mainstream local/product search flow at a time when the consumer has very high purchase intent… directly shopping in store. Seems like a potentially interesting expansion area for someone like Milo, Placecast or Geodelic.
