Retail is the first industry to grasp the importance of beacons as a hardware platform but beacons require much more effort than affix and spam. According to new research from BI Intelligence, there are going to be thousands of these things in circulation by the end of the year - mostly in retail - which can be good, only if retailers (and all businesses for that matter) heed Chucks words in this episode....
Welcome to episode #193. On the show: HBC and Lord & Taylor commit to beacons; Instagram launches their Snapchat competitor Bolt; Medialets helps with attribution; Tipbombing your favourite street artist; Verizon kicks off their smart rewards program; Glympse embeds itself within Kik messenger; Nike gives away merchandise with FuelBox; Andrew Mason emerges with Detour; NextNav raises $70M. Our special guest is Debbie Kiederer of LiveLux and our resource of the week examines the differences b...
Henry Lawson's company rolled out 170 beacons across 130 retailers in the oldest and most known shopping street on earth - Regent Street in London. Not only did they manage to convince the Queen that this was a good idea (well, her company The Crown Estate), they also had to manage the largest and most prestigious retailers on the planet as well. This is that story. How did Autograph land the Queen of England as a client? What were some of the challenges? How did they find their first client? Ho...
When you think of mobile, email doesn't really jump out as part of a grand strategy. The thing is that for most of us - close to 60% in fact - email is consumed primarily on our mobile devices. This makes email part of your mobile strategy and it is not business as usual. There are things that email should and shouldn't do in the mobile environment and Greg brings some important suggestions that you can get up and running right away. Mobile isn't just about apps or mobile web or shopping or game...
Want to know the secret to a successful app? Well, listen up, here it is. Testing, iteration, interaction and testing again. In short, the secret to a successful app is hard work. There are no shortcuts in the app world any more. A huge part of the success of your app depends on a very important cycle with your customers - one that if done right will bring you closer to your customer (and satisfying their requirements of you) than ever before. That cycle is testing. If everything is in place and...
The Hudson's Bay Company - the oldest retailer in North America - is showing everyone how to bring beacons into retail by rolling them out in 130 stores across North America. HBC partnered with Swirl, the iBeacon marketing platform company based in Boston, to implement this feat. Chuck dove head-long into this story by visiting the Boston Lord & Taylor and by interviewing Swirl CEO Hilmi Ozguc to get the amazing details on this massive roll out....
Welcome to episode #192. On the show: Factual's Trusted Data Contributor program; Target gets in the image recognition game; Applebee's hands over the keys to their Instagram account; Hillshire Brands bumps sausage revenue by 20% with beacons; Vibes gets personal with messaging; Marketron brings location-based services to broadcasters; DELI Amsterdam offers personality-based travel recommendations; First Data's new Perka loyalty program; PopJam's Instagram for kids; Guardians of the Galaxy VR pr...
Just 13 weeks ago I featured this very same duo about their company, Mahana, and their focus on bringing beacons (and their benefits) into the restaurant industry. As a sign of how quickly things - and business focus - change (and need to change), they are back on to talk about the shift in their business and why. If there is one thing that the mobile world has taught all of us it is that it is very hard to fall in love with a business idea. I've seen many do this and not see the industry change...
Being "the mobile gal/guy" is sometimes lonely. There are few that really grasp the reach and impact mobile is having on every single business. If they did understand, you - the mobile soothsayer - would actually run the company. That's how important it is from this point and going forward. Am I right? Marketing mobile INSIDE the organization is as important - if not more - in the early stages of a mobile marketing strategy. The problem is that there is a gap between identifying a need for mobil...
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. If there is one thing that mobile has done for communications it has made it easier to send more people more messages more easily. It has also empowered the receiver to turn it off, tune it out and forget just as easily. This is the challenge for all marketers and brand-builders looking to use mobile messaging to grow their empire. The balance must be perfect: Too many messages and in the wrong context and the battle is lost. Too few messages or mess...
One of the allures of online and mobile shopping is that there is almost always a sure guarantee the product will be in inventory. You may have to wait a day or two for it to get to your doorstep but odds are the thing you order will be delivered. Not so for traditional retail stores. There is nothing more frustrating than finding the product you want, making your way to the store only to find it isn't available at that location. Inventory is becoming an important lever in retail behind experien...
Welcome to episode #191. On the show: Bonnaroo's beacon results; Heineken's @wherenext twitter service; Clear Channel launches their "Connect" platform; Petpace tracks the health of your pet; AdNear teams up with Mindshare for location targeting in Asia; Samsung launches "CentreStage" in BestBuy; Marriott launches LocalPerks; Birchbox opens up a real-life store in SoHo; Hermes' Fox Den window display; The Sensing Umbrella. Special guest is Henry Lawson of Autograph (the company that installed be...
One of the challenges of being an entrepreneur and founder is finding the capital to spark growth. There are obviously many ways to do it - from bootstrapping to taking on debt to finding an equity investor - but for most of us with big ideas it is the equity investment we tend to gravitate towards. Growth happens for a reason but to achieve the kind of growth we all want venture capitalists are often-times essential fuel. It is no different for those of you out there building mobile services an...
Where do you begin? That is the hardest question to answer when you are facing an obstacle like mobile marketing. Where do you begin marketing your business through mobile. What are the first things you should be working on when there are infinite ways and places to start? You must start with intention and from a place of strength as mobile can overwhelm its victims very quickly - so start well, start focused but please please please start quickly. If you are lost, confused or knee deep and sink...
The long and sometimes expensive process of building an app, marketing an app and having someone download an app is challenging enough. The problem is that what happens next is even more of a hurdle: Getting the users to engage or re-engage with the app. Most app studies show us that we, the app consumers on the planet, rarely open a downloaded app a second or third time. So, after all that effort to build, market and deploy your apps, how do you get a second or third open? How does your app bec...
The latest research points to the increased comfort consumers are feeling towards using mobile payments for anything from toys to furniture to pet supplies. So who is the ideal customer? What is the ideal platform for mobile commerce? What is everyone spending their mobile dollars on? Shopgate's latest research shows us in detail and Chuck paints that picture for you in 2 minutes here....
There have been many companies that have attempted to perfect the coupon redemption process to varying degrees of success. Most of that success has come in the form of company exits for the founders, not so much when it comes to satisfied customers but a Canadian company may be hitting the sweet spot for that. The company is called Checkout 51 and Chuck offers his thoughts on the service here. #GoCanada...
Welcome to episode #190. On the show: Google's Chromecast gets Ultrasonic; Chicago's Array of Things makes the city smarter and creepier; Telefonica deploys Brainstorm's platform to all markets; ReservationHop takes reservations hostages; Amscreen and Garmin partner at the Tour de France; Muuzii taps SMS for real-time translations; Nescafe's PopUp Cafe puts real coffee in the newspaper - including the cup; RetailNext and iZettle close financing rounds; Ubisoft shows us the map of the future; TAB...
We are running out of wearable real-estate. Wrists, ankles, nose, eyes, head. Most of us will probably wear something - one thing - not a lot of things at the same time. Unless you are an experiment, you will more than likely find a wearable that measures what you are interested in and wear that one. These wearables may be about behaviour change or health measurement or, in the case of this episode, athletic improvement. Most athletes are in the business of improvement. They've invented technolo...
Mobile marketing used to be much simpler if you can believe it - back when the only thing marketers had to worry about was the phone. Now, because of the phone, the way we define mobile marketing has changed (and continues to change) drastically. In episode #2 of the Mobile Marketing Minute, we discuss the pieces that fall under mobile marketing and the concept that the message needs to change depending on the screen your customer is looking at....
Continuing on our look at mobile dominant economies we turn our attention to South Korea in this episode. With 28 million iOS and Android devices and mobile consumer base addicted to apps, South Korea is a nation that cannot be ignored by mobile app developers seeking to expand their reach. Peggy highlights the most important tactics to entering the market and some of the pitfalls you should avoid entering the market as well as in your app....
We all know that retail has taken a licking as a result of the mobile revolution. It has been the punching bag for upstarts and analysts, it has been chided in all media, it has become subservient to the almighty consumer, it has quite simply lost its mojo. For every glimmer of hope that the retail industry has caught on, has embraced its new lord, has turned a corner, reality hits home time and again. A new study by Boston Retail Partners reiterates this cycle and shows retailers are still in a...
The Internet of Things is a grand plan - nodes and sensors everywhere, data being collected and processed and displayed at the right time to the right person for the right reason. The concepts around predictive data modelling and full-on artificial intelligence are, for the most part, predictive in themselves. These visions are how we think of it looking forward from it today but, as we've seen over the last 7 years, the world today hardly resembles the world in which we predicted before mobile ...
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Mobile Marketing Minute - a weekly look at the strategy required to make mobile an essential part of your marketing mix. During these episodes you will learn how to augment your current marketing efforts with mobile to help reach your target customer, increase your reach and visibility and drive more quality leads and revenue all because of concepts we will share. This first episode, my co-host and mobile marketing force Greg Hickman (of the Mobile Mixed p...
Two incredible studies (one by Euclid, the other by BrandingBrand) focus on the influence mobile is having on the shopping experience. They also shine a light on possibly the biggest challenge for retailers: "Dark retail." Similar to the "dark web" - the private sharing and linking of websites and data that can't be measured by traditional analytics, Dark Retail encompasses the influences that affect the consumer's path to purchase that cannot be measured. The path to purchase has never been a s...
Radio has always been one of the things that has been consistently ripe for mobile disruption on two fronts. The first is broadcast which is being handled by the likes of RDIO, Spotify, Pandora, Songza, iTunes Radio and now Amazon among many many others. All-told there are roughly 140 million Internet radio listeners that share their time across the new broadcasters. Not a huge global industry, but enough to warrant a rethink of the business and engagement models - which is the second piece ripe...
How does a small payments app company from Toronto make a name for itself? How about driving 8% of in-store sales on day 1 of using the service? Or, how about contributing to an over 20% increase in sales during that day as well? Or even increasing basket size by 17%? Compelling reasons, but those are just the start. In order to succeed here where others have failed sometimes a philosophy adjustment is in order. For Wendy MacKinnon Keith that philosophy started with understanding the root proble...
Mikael Cho is tenacious. Listening to this story it will become very clear that tenacity is the intangible skill in the entrepreneurs arsenal. It isn't given. It isn't learned. You have it or you don't. The thing is, to be an entrepreneur you need it. This is Mikael's third visit to UNTETHER.tv - the first two were centered around the previous incarnation of his current business called OOOMPH. He is now the CEO of its evolution into Crew, a marketplace for matching highly qualified mobile develo...
We take a million photos a year. We post frantically on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare. We are digital. We don't hang photos on the wall anymore. We are also human and forget the things that happened at the places they happened with the people it happened with. I know this fits my profile. You? Since the emergence of digital photography and then social networks, I've looked for a way to capture and surface my digital life in a way that requires the smallest effort on my part. This i...
Email. Love it or hate it, there is still nothing that rivals it as a business tool. Everyone has an email address and the adoption and use is not abating despite the other communication channels that have emerged. Email has become synonymous with the smartphones we use - think back to the original flavour of BlackBerry, it was sold as a mobile email tool. Legend has it that when Lazaridis saw people responding to email on their BlackBerry's while sitting in front of their desktops he knew a shi...
