How much information is too much?

I know, I wrote a lot of collecting user information and how our privacy is compromised, but there is another view for this.
As a marketer we need sometimes to know things about the consumer. And as a marketer we don't have always all information we need. As a marketer,I would say, there is no thing as too much.



We did read the last couple of weeks about Apple, Google and Microsoft and that they collected locations from their customers. As a marketer I would like to get this deep information, and as a marketer we love Facebook and the information they collect.

Information it knowledge and knowledge help us marketer to understand how good our marketing is. When we run campaigns we, want to know everything about our consumers. We want to know how old they are, where they live, what their income is etc. All this information helps us to make our products better.

Insight in this even helps to produce products cheaper or to make necessary changes to our products.

There is an Interesting story about a big brand which sold a cold coffee drink in Asia. The sales went up and up. The brand decided to build another plant to produce more of these drinks. But suddenly the sales almost stopped. The company had no idea why and started to research. The reason why the drink did not sell anymore was simple. The people in Asia did not buy the drink because it was so good, they bought it, because the container could serve as a drinking glass. As soon everybody had enough drinking glasses they stopped buying the drink. The company could have saved a lot of money and not build a new plant if they had known it, or maybe could have market only the container without the liquid.

Especially smaller companies are in the need to know a lot of their consumers or potential customer. They might try a new campaign, a QR code in a magazine which links to a website, After four weeks running the campaign, the company wants to know how many people scanned the code, what profession they are and the location of the people.

Standard web analytics will give you the browser type, maybe the device type, an ip address for location. This is not a lot. We want to know the exact place when the scan happened and the age and gender etc of the people who scanned the code. If we see that the average income is over $100k and mostly female, we might in the future run the QR campaign in a woman magazine targeted to higher income women.

Most of the time there are only two ways to get these detailed information, either we ask a company to test this with their known user group or we request the consumer to fill out a form when they navigate to the target website. The latter will scare many users or they are not honest with their answer.
The first method is usually expensive and gives us only la snapshot of the potential users.

A third method would be to analyze the surf behavior of all users to determine (depending on the behavior) what type of users is interested in our products. This is very time consuming and not very reliable if the data mining is done wrong.

But having the data on hand without a survey or form would be golden.

Apple and Co. do have this information, but we as a marketer don't get it from them.

At Facebook we can tailor an ad to a specific group of people like gay men who like to watch football. But FB would not give to us the detailed results after a camping run.

There should be two things happen in the future. The consumer needs to be educated that eventual his data will be stored (and explaining which data) if they decide not to opt out and Apple, Facebook etc. should share all these details with us marketer.

If Apple knows who does what with their cell phones, we, the marketer, should know too.

The more we know about our consumers the better we target our ads, the less the consumer will be annoyed by the ads.

A great conundrum, by giving us the all details we need the less ads we need to run the happier the consumer is, the more money we can spend.

You might know the answer when you go the next time in the store and wonder why the cereal got more expensive.


- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:E Sheridan Rd,Salt Lake City,United States

Great product not so Great

3 Year ago, almost exact this day my wife told me she is pregnant. At same day i went to a car dealer and bought a big SUV.
Then i went to ToysRus, Walmart and Target to look for an internal rear mirror that i will be able to see my newborn child when driving the car without turning my head. I did find a few but none of them worked well. Either the mirror was too small or it did still not work because newborns are facing backwards and i had to look through two mirrors to see the baby seat.

I went online and searched for a camera system, i did found one but this company was out of business (at this time i thought i knew why).

I went ahead and did build my own system by buying a wireless rear camera set  and did design a special mount for the camera, which i believed was the issue of the other system. They used a flexible arm to mount the camera which can break easily. My system is different the camera is mounted between the headrest polls, which makes it very stable and puts it in the right position. It is easily to uninstall and to mount it again to the front headrest when the baby is front facing. I did even file for patent for this mount.

My son got born in April 2.5 years ago and since this time my system is successful in use.
I showed it my neighbors and they liked and ordered from me the system.








I thought i had an Eureka effect and tried to get funding for this system. I needed around $500.000 to produce it cheap enough in China, to sell it under $100 and still make good profit. No luck.
As a product marketing person, i did build a website, did post about it and tried all channels i know (i even talked with car dealers, but again, these are mostly men)

Still no luck and then i started to wondering what is the problem with this system. It had all a good product would need.
1. Easy to explain
2. Solves a big problem
3. No competition

What i learned over the years is that this product is very well accepted by women, however because it is technical (even if easy to install) it needed to plugged into car power outlets and to be mounted to the headrest.

These are usually tasks done by men and men don't want to have anything in their car which can change the interior look and feel. The system is using its own screen which can be either mounted on the dashboard or clipped into an AC fan outlet. If it has been a navigation system, they would not have cared, but a baby monitoring system, which could potentially indicate that the car is a family car or would destroy the rolling man cave, is a no brainer.

I am still using the camera and i am still dreaming about this product being in millions of cars, but it is only a dream, because of missing start up money.

But what i learned is, that great products which needs a man and a woman to convince needs to be attractive for both. If you have a product which a woman likes but needs to be installed into a man territory and the man does not like it, then it won' work. the same the other way around.

finally i did call the other guy and asked him why he does not sell his system anymore and he had three reasons, too expensive, to easy to break and the main reason was he could not market it good enough that men would like it (women were scared of installing something).

I should have better asked him from the beginning before i started to dream.

I never give up and whenever i find 5000 pre-orders i will start again. I already know some modifications for this.

Check out the website: http://kinder-watch.com/

Sound is the new click and touch

The world is changing and smart phones are helping a lot to change the world.
More and more applications for the iPhone and Androids are using sound for interaction instead of touching or clicking on banners.

Last night I watched one of my favorite shows "Eureka". During the show an ad came up to tell the audience to start their Shazam application to get exclusive videos from the show.
Shazam is an app which listen usually to music and gives the user the name of the song and author back. It is a pretty nice app, for people like me, who never know any songs. It is easy to use, you start the app hold the phone in front of a speaker and hit the button. 10 seconds later the info is on the phone screen.
This time, with Eureka, it gave me much more info back and worked perfect.







Pretty amazing how advertising is combining TV and smart phones and using sound for this.

If would have to put in a code or scan an image on the TV it would have been too much work, but starting an app without leaving the bed is perfect.

This is not the first time that an app is using sound to tricker certain things on your phone. The first time i saw, was with the Best Buy movie mode app. The app will translate the hilarious minions talking, when you run this app in selected 3D cinemas. The translation is text only that other movie visitors don't get disturbed.

Sony has for their 51 blue ray video an app which will give the user specials when watching the movie.

And then there is kickbucks. An app to collect points in stores. You can either get points by scanning barcodes or through sound.
The idea is that certain stores have multiple speakers installed in different places of store. The app will collect points, whenever the user is close to one of the speakers. The person might go to the dressing room and gets 50 points. These points can be redeemed through the app at the offered stores.



The idea with sound is great because it has better proximity than GPS. GPS is only as good as 20 meters and not working well in buildings. With sound you can get better results.
The application works impressive well, however you can fake the system if you have two iPhones. One is using iAnalyzer to record and play sound and the the other is running kickbucks. However it only works if you are in or close to the store.
But I was able to collect 1200 points instead of only 50 points.

Bottom line is, that companies are understanding that there is much more possibilities than just clicking on a screen or typing with keyboard to interact with customer or target audience.

The next iPhone will have a RFID reader which opens much more for the world, especially for retail stores.

The Internet stores started to take consumers away from brick and mortar stores. Smart phones and their apps will take the consumer away from the Internet stores but bring them back again to the b&m stores.

Smart phones are helping to combine online and offline into one new type of shopping experience.


- Posted using My iPad

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Marketing 4.0

Since marketing is around we went through three stages of marketing.

Marketing 1.0
Product-Centric Marketing
Interaction with consumer:
one-to-many transactions

Marketing 2.0
Consumer-orientated Marketing
Interaction with consumer:
One-to-one relationship

Marketing 3.0
Value-driven Marketing
Interaction with consumer:
Many-to-many collaboration

Marketing 3.0 is using social and crowd collaboration to promote products, However the next step is already on the market, which could be defined marketing 4.0

Marketing 4.0 is localized virtual marketing. The goal is to engage the consumer with virtual goods to get their opinion on products before they are ready for market. But at the same time to get the consumer attention in their one little virtual world.
More and more people are escaping the real world to play games like farmville or to be someone else in second life.
Many years the brands ignored the virtual life of consumers, but finally companies like General Mills are taking these worlds more serious.
ThinkEquity is estimating a revenue for virtual goods as high as $2 billion this year. The beauty on virtual goods is micro payments, usually they cost only between $1 and $4, which is small enough for impulse buy, but the real killer is the branding.
Take a game like Tiger Woods golf for the iPhone, why should the user not be able to buy a Nike Square driver for a few bugs to see how good his virtual player is performing with this club. For each fairway hit with the club, the user will get points, and these points will result into discount, if the user want to buy the real Nike Square driver.
This is marketing 4.0. H&M, Volvo, General Mills and others have already discovered this opportunity and spending together on Marketing 4.0 over $50 Million this year.
In the virtual world, users are represent themselves as what they want to be or, play things they have fun, these are the best places to catch the users interests and to sell branded products. Combined with marketing 3.0 and social, we as marketer get the full 360 degrees view of our consumers.
John Doe might play farmville in a cafe close to publix. General Mills could send via farmville coupons for their broccoli at publix.
Polo Ralph Lauren could test new jeans style in second life, to see how the consumer does accept the new style. The new Jeans might go in production when enough people have bought the jeans in the virtual world. This helps branding new products and save a lot of money for production of things people might not buy.


- Posted using My iPad