How to Use Location Applications to Improve Brand Marketing

"Erik: What do you consider when designing online experiences that connect to consumers to in store purchasing experiences? Caroline: The art of location. Um, well it depends on the brand, but a really fascinating progression in marketing is location. And the fact that a marketer can now – not just, how do you weave location into the campaign? The fascinating part was that they could do it in the first place. So, what do I consider? I consider the audience that I’m talking to – what I mean by that, is if we think about applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, Looped, Scvngr, what have you, you instantly think about millions of users. But when the marketer is thinking about TV, versus online, versus outdoor, versus this application in a mobile space that has millions of users, the scale isn’t quite there. So, the first thing I have to consider is keeping it real. Yes, this platform may have a small percentage of the American audience on it, but it’s a very engaged universe. Because you’ve got someone using their device everywhere they go, and communicating with the brand on that device. So keeping it real is first, and then two is, well how can we maximize whatever we’re doing at the point of purchase, via, you know, through an application that is the brands, be it, through these applications that I just mentioned. How do we take it from here and turn it up? Because the thing with a lot of those applications that I just mentioned, while they focus on user experience, they haven’t quite figured out what to do with advertisers, because they’re new. And everyone thinks, “Oh, because they’ve been around for a few years they’ve figured it out,” well not really. They’re coming to maturation, but it’s our job as the agency to say, “hey guys, here’s what we need to know going forward.” Will they move on that right away? No, because again they’re still very focused on making the best user experience. But as the, you know, as the person speaking on behalf of the brand, I have to at the end of the day mete out to the brand why these platforms are beneficial to them. And so moving the needle on constantly getting them to push a little bit farther along is the most important."