An old joke has two guys camping when a bear approaches them in a threatening manner. One guy slowly begins to put on his sneakers. His companion says, "What are you doing? You can't outrun that bear!" He replies, "I don't have to outrun the bear, only you." Sometimes it's not how fast you run, it's whether you run faster than your competition.
The threatening animal in this case is a wave of new technology: The challenge isn't outrunning your competition to get away; it's getting close to it before they do.
Customer experience at some level is inseparable from the technologies that enable or inhibit the quality of that experience. The next few posts of Best Customer Connection address a particular mobile phone application, Foursquare, and the underlying dynamics that affect customers. Whether or not you ever actually use Foursquare, the broader technology will most certainly impact you as a customer, as someone providing services to customers, or as a marketing professional seeking to know more about your customers and their behavior.
Some readers of Best Customer Connection live at the leading edge of new technologies, and for you the beginning of this post will be familiar ground; scan ahead to find what is new for you. Other readers don't make coming technological trends a high priority until they begin to have immediate impact. That time is fast approaching so, if you don't know about location-based services, read on.
Want to find a good restaurant nearby? Want to know what is playing at the movies and at what time? It's all at your fingertips...
If you have an iPhone or any other Smartphone, you probably already use a variety of location-based services. You know these by names such as Yelp, Fandango, Urbanspoon and OpenTable. These are each applications that access the GPS capability of your Smartphone and combine that with the capabilities you desire to have at your fingertips. This includes, finding nearby restaurants, movie theaters, gas stations and even other people in your vicinity using the same mobile app.
If you can find these service providers, you can be sure they want to find you too!
This technology is driving a new wave of marketing initiatives, as well as social networking and novel experiments to tie customers closer to the places they spend time and money.
You don't have to be the first to discover how to benefit from this, just make sure you aren't the last.
For Marketing Professionals there are 3 things you need to know about location-based services (LBS):
1. They elicit images of heaven and hell. Blogs and news stories tend toward extreme views, ranging from cool to creepy. My view: don't ignore the world around you; know the basics and form your own opinion.
2. These services carry the ghost of innovations past. You can find parallels to the history of targeted email marketing, which also had a pattern of growing enthusiasm, wild hype, disillusionment and eventually proper positioning. Don't ignore LBS because it may follow a prior pattern of idea diffusion: instead temper the hype with a historical perspective.
3. Consider if you can take advantage of the future before the next guy does. Remember, you don't have to outrace the bear, just the guy next to you. Hype doesn't mean there isn't real value to be had; it means you have to separate out hype from opportunity. Map your potential business opportunities to this. What part of your business strategy can leverage LBS?
OK, with that as a short introduction, read the next post for a short primer about how these services actually work and who cares (big and small retail business sure do,so shouldn't you?) Or look for a third post, 'From cool to creepy: what you really need to know about the future of location-based services'.
In the mean time, I'm going to 'check in' at the coffee shop near where I work and see if I've earned another discount. If we are in the vicinity at the same time, Foursquare can let us know!