In this chapter you will read about:
• The new SoLoMo environment
• The NFC (near field communication) technology
• Wearable items
• New technologies
• Online brand reputation management
• Social media enterprises
Introduction
Over the last years the amount of change that we have witnessed as consumers is astounding. Some of the new technologies have managed to change the market place and revolutionize multiple industries in a very short period of time. Mobile phones are playing a huge role in this change. So far phones had to contact with cell towers in order to be able to be used. But a new era is rising! Now they can communicate with our product and service retailers and new wearable technologies like the high-tech bangles on our wrists. The new technology is creating a totally new truly intelligent ecosystem.
But what is the role of the business in this new environment where the technology is moving so fast that many firms are not able to keep up? These firms should aim to know and understand the customer to such an extent that the product or service fits them and practically sells itself. In other words we need to move ahead from simply knowing the consumer to understanding their needs.
The new system that is arising is no doubt flooded with smart technology and massive amounts of data. These will give the power to business and enable marketers to capture an intelligence that far surpasses anything in the past. With the use of the new technologies the products will be able to sell themselves because in the minds of the consumers they are positioned as helpful and needed.
The New Environment
The business environment is constantly changing, and firms need to be prepared in order to take advantage of the new opportunities that are created in a new ecosystem that accelerates creativity, innovation, and of course focuses a lot on entrepreneurial spirit (Ankeny, 2013).
The new idea is not only creating applications that the user needs to give the input every time, but creating applications that will learn from experience (Chaney, 2015). In this way they will be able to improve with every single interaction and with no doubt they will be able to assist the consumer into making simple and more complex purchase decisions. Other cognitive computing, which involves self-learning systems that use data mining and other pattern recognition, will change the industry environment and the society habits and patterns.
One of the main issues that consumers are facing today is that they have in their disposal an infinite amount of information, but unfortunately they have limited time to access it. Most of the devices that we are using today are relying on humans in order to receive the initial information. That leads to today’s problem, which is the limited time, attention, and accuracy of the consumers.
As Oh et al. (2014) argue, new types of innovation in the near future will help consumers to manage massive amounts of consumer data. Since more and more devices are being connected to the Internet, more and more information will be shared among the users. That will inevitably lead to sharing of knowledge and experience. Firms are already focusing toward such extensions where the sharing of the shopping experience holds a centered role and more consumer data are available for brands.
The new environment is also demanding new types of technologies like different kinds of wearables (Bruno, 2015). Until now most manufactures have been focusing on wearables that have to do with health and fitness technology, but as tech moves beyond the activity tracker and becomes fundamental to our daily health and fitness, those wearables have a new meaning.
The new environment is without question characterized with mobile development. More and more new features are being incorporated into smartphones. This trend will not slow down since the mobile market has not settled yet. Following this trend the location-based mobile commerce and the applications built within the mobile environment will change industries in the next coming years. One great example is iBeacon which is a location-aware transmitter at all of their US retail stores, essentially providing to the company the ability to pass on product information to the consumers and allowing them to check out very quickly through their iPhone. The phone is now changing to a personalized map that reveals all the type of information that the consumer is interesting in and hiding all the irrelevant that could distract their shopping attention.
At the same time the new environment could incorporate some technologies that could definitely change the traditional way of shopping and that will make firms to rethink their online and offline strategies. Again with the use of iBeacon the consumer may pause in front of a concert poster in the underground metro station and just by scanning the code in the poster the consumer could just buy the ticket with a single tap. In that case the poster is basically the advertisement but at the same time the point of sales (POS) and the only point of contact with the consumer. That poster is becoming an “all in one point” of interaction.
Of course in this turbulent environment consumers crave recognition of their individuality, even though they are pleading for respect of their private life. This antithetical approach is quite intriguing for the marketing managers. One way to solve this issue is the collaborative consumption. For example, with the wearable technology consumers share information and brands must understand that it is not in their hands but in the hands of societal, economic, and tech-driven factors, for this information to be shared. Consumers are engaging themselves into platforms where they becoming part of the business model. This new type of trend in the business environment has to do mostly with thinking a new way of how different types of services are managed and consumed. New types of technologies give the firms opportunity to create a market where people with same goals could be connected. Basically it is the idea of “prosumption” in which customers are the producers and the consumers at the same time.
Another aspect that could enhance the formation of the new business environment is that of collaborative purchasing through branded crowdfunding. The firm that made this model quite popular is Kickstarter where basically the consumers “put their money where their mouth is.” What Kickstarter does is focusing on enabling new brands using technology. This type of collaborative purchasing is the next wave of digital opportunities for brands. Branded crowdfunding can also create stronger signals from intent to actual purchase.
The NFC (Near Field Communication) Technology
Before we start analyzing the benefits of NFC technology for the firms and also for the consumers, let us first define what NFC is. NFC is enabling through wireless technology, data to be exchanged between two devices that are very close to each other (Dutot, 2015). The technology is simple. It is a short-range, low-power wireless link evolved from radio-frequency identification (RFID) tech that can transfer small amounts of data between two devices held a few centimeters from each other. Consumers, simply by bringing two NFC-enabled devices very close together, start automatically a communication in between those two devices without having to open any other applications.
Basically NFC technology is able to identify the consumers, connect to their bank account and communicate these information to the retailer in order to make a payment (Pham and Ho, 2015). But what is the actual difference between NFC technology and any other previous pairing technologies? The answer is very simple! There is no pairing involved. Our mobile phone does not need to be connected with another device. The only thing the consumers need to do is to tap their phones on a contactless payment terminal in a shop, train station or coffee shop and through the NFC technology the bank account of the user is going to be identified. But it does not stop there. Personal preferences and shopping habits are being spotted, making the purchase experience faster and easier.
Consumers want to be able to communicate with the firms in the easiest possible way. They usually forget their passwords of their different accounts, and sometimes they do not even remember that they have an account in a specific firm. How many times have we tried to register in a specific website and get back a message saying “This email is already being used. If you forgot your password please click here.” Firms need to realize that consumers are in need of secure but extremely easy ways of access when they are buying products online. They are in need of instant intuitive connectivity, zero configuration, and smart key access, and NFC technology could offer that.
Retailers could make use of NFC technology mainly through four categories of NFC applications. The first one is the “Touch & Go.” In order for the consumers to make use of this application they need to put the device reader close to the access code. The access code could be in a poster in bus station. For example, a concert is being advertised in a poster. The consumer could easily buy the ticket just by bringing close to the poster. Another category of NFC application is the “Touch & Confirm.” In this category is included any mobile payment that the consumer needs to confirm just by simply entering a password in order to accept the transaction. The third category is called “Touch & Connect.” Under this category we have all the data transfer that could happen between two mobile devices. It is essentially a peer to peer data transfer. In other words consumers could exchange instantly music, images, etc. In today’s complex environment, mobile phones equipped with NFC technology will enable consumers to exchange personal data extremely fast with no effort at all. Just by bringing two NFC-equipped devices close to each other consumers will effortlessly exchange and store personal data. The fourth category is called “Touch & Explore.” Consumers are able to explore different services that are being offered by the same retailer without even typing the URL in their browser. In other words the retailers could help consumer to read information and search special offers, coupons, and discounts from smart posters or smart billboards.
Undoubtedly the greatest advantage is that an NFC-enabled phone is able to make an online payment with no effort from the part of the consumer. That means that the consumer is not actually putting the product in the basket of the online store and return later to make the actual buy. They proceed directly to the buy and that is giving them less time to change their mind!
NFC mobile contactless payments can be made at both attended POS locations (such as stores) and unattended locations (such as vending machines) that use the existing merchant payments infrastructure. To pay, the consumer simply brings the phone to within a few inches of a contactless payment-capable POS system and the transaction occurs. It is the exact same process.
Of course since NFC is a fairly new technology that is being introduced it comes along with many concerns and especially with concerns that have to do with security issues, since this new type of technology has access to the bank accounts of the consumers. In order to reassure the consumers NFC technology uses different type of security levels for different applications. For example, payment account information and payment transactions are highly secure. All financial and personal information is stored in a secured area in the NFC phone, commonly called the “secure element.” In other words, the application and payment account information are encrypted and stored in a secure area in the phone. On the other hand, if NFC technology I used for “Touch & Explore” applications then they might have little to no security. The phone that uses NFC technology to communicate with the retailers’ contactless payment system is quite similar to the contactless payment cards and devices that we are using today and consumer are becoming more and more familiar. The payment processes are the same processes used when the consumer pays with a traditional contactless or magnetic stripe credit or debit payment card.
Wearable Items
While marketers are still learning how to leverage location-based marketing, wearable tech is becoming more and more popular and is wining grounds extremely fast in today’s marketplace (Bruno, 2015). More and more firms are launching new accessories that either work as stand-alone products or need to be connected to the smartphone of the consumer. Either way it is becoming a huge trend. In general wearable items are quite expensive breakthrough products that are using extremely sophisticated technology. Firms need to differentiate and retailers need to make use of this new trend. Before analyzing the benefits and how retailers could incorporate in their marketing strategies the wearable technology lets identify the new trends of the wearable market.
Wearable fitness technologies have gained the broadest acceptance among consumers. We witness the future of health and fitness technology as tech moved beyond the activity tracker and become fundamental to our daily health and fitness. Instead of simply tracking our activity, they are actually guiding us. The question that firms are facing now is if the consumers will continue to buy limited-function devices when their smartphones can deliver a lot of the same value. A category by its self is Google Glass (Park and Skoric, 2015). Although the product is not widely available to consumers, Google Glass has empowered the firm to test the market and change the initial product to an intelligent personal assistant that will power the next generation of wearable tech devices (Kinnunen et al., 2016).
Another new category that is picking up really fast is the smart watches. Wearable tech watches are often designed as smartphone extenders, allowing users to see messages and caller ID without taking out their phones and are the category where fashionistas are making their mark. In addition to that and while it is still in its infancy, wearable tech jewelry offers highly targeted functionality. A ring that could look as a normal ring and with NFC technology it will be able to unlock doors and mobile devices.
The constantly changing environment, especially of the wearable market, is pushing for changes in the social media platforms. The current platforms are not yet optimized to receive information from the wearable items. The main reason for that is because most of the social media are designed for interaction to take place on screen-based devices, which is not the case for most of the new wearable items. The new devices have limited screens and in some case they have not at all, which means that the social media platforms will have eventually to adapt in order to facilitate meaningful interactions on wearable tech.
Wearable items will be able though to communicate with social network platforms automatically. Of course the authorization from the users’ side will be necessary. Once the user approves that, then the wearable devices will be able to identify under which situation they could publish an update automatically. For example, if a smart watch detects that you run 5 km and burned 500 calories in a specific location and the user has preapproved the sharing of fitness information, then the smart watch will automatically share this information in a social media platform.
Another feature which is underused is the voice recognition. In the wearable items where the screen is extremely small or even there is no screen, the voice recognition is going to play a really important role. Due to this fact a new era of social media is going to arise and new social media platforms will be developed just for voice.
New Technologies
The ever-present technology will challenge marketers to develop a sensor that could read people’s biological responses when purchasing and using products and services. Responding to a customer’s context may no longer simply be about their location, but more about their emotional state!
This new types of wearable technologies are offering to the retailers an amazing opportunity to understand the consumers. Sensors and display technologies are being embedded into clothing and they could identify in real time the emotional state of the consumer. These sensors could understand the different types of mood and levels of stress simply by just displaying light or a different color in order to inform both the wearer and those that are connected with him or her. Consumers don’t want to suppress their negative emotions but at the same time they do not want to shout them out loud. Weirdly enough they are waiting from other people to “sense” their mood! A person wants real-time feedback from another person. There is a new concept in the market were just by wearing a vest you could feel another person’s heartbeat as a vibration, so you would basically subscribe to the other person’s heart rate data and then feel it inside of your vest. In that way you can respond immediately to the others person reactions.
The new technology incorporated with the wearable items could help retailers to capture things like a heart rate and then try to interpret that in their benefit. For example, if consumers are really excited about a brand then their heart rate will increase. If retailers now the exact moment that this will take place they could reinforce that feeling with an extra offer for example, or they could suggest some cross-sales through the app.
If retailers could understand the consumer’s normal emotional state and could see in real time when it is getting out of normal range then they could have an amazing opportunity to intervene with some sort of experience that the person might be receptive to. In other words they could provide some sort of real-time help or feedback in the moment. Retailers could use wearable technology in order to provide consumers with convenience marketing, making the life of the consumer as easy as possible. Let us imagine the following scenario. You are running late for a business meeting and the traffic is terrible according to your online update. You prenotify your colleagues that you’re running late based on your distance from the meeting and you call a taxi through an app. At the same time your phone detects high levels of stress and plays your favorite music in order to relax you.
Of course according to the previous scenario the consumers have given full access to their personal information. Firms need to set aside the inevitable questions of personal data and privacy, but at the same time they need to make consumers feel comfortable to give their personal data on the spot (i.e., detect emotions). The amount of data that is being gathered from the wearable items could open a total new field for the consumer behavior analysis. No company is currently broadcasting its intention to sell the data generated from wearable items, but it is going to be a matter of time. The fact that firms have enormous amount of data it doesn’t mean that they can make full use of it. They need to have specialized people in the marketing team to perform data analysis. With this new technology the amount of data is going to be enormous and firms need to be able to interpret it.
Undoubtedly, the natural extension of these devices is to become from wearable to implantable. In the next years we will move from glasses to lenses and from clothes that show our mood to e-ink tattoos that light up and express our feelings in the current situation.
Online Brand Reputation Management
Brand reputation is the customers’ perception of a company. Online reputation management is the process of controlling what shows up when someone Googles the name of your firm. The aim of every firm should be to promote a positive content to the top of every search result and at the same time all the negative ones should be pushed aside.
Many firms do not realize that they need to concern about their online reputation. Sometimes they are just wondering why people say bad things about them online, even though they have done nothing wrong. Building a strong brand is an ongoing and extreme difficult process that takes a long time. All that effort could be wasted just in a few days or even hours if something goes wrong. Sometimes the damage is so big that there is no way back. That could happen especially if the negative comments appear in websites that are really high in search engines, so anyone doing a search on the company name will probably see them. Sometimes those negative comments are true and sometimes are not. Either way they threaten the firm’s well-being.
No matter how small or big your business is, the consumers and prospects are going to talk about you. Especially in today’s hyper connected world the consumers are going to tweet about an event that your firm hold, they will leave a comment in your Instagram account and even in your Facebook page and so on. Regular interactions on social networks are vital to any business success. There is no way for a firm to avoid this! The only thing that can be done is to constantly scan the Internet. Online brand reputation management is not just social media monitoring, or online public relations, but it is a philosophy. Once the firm embraces that philosophy, the impact on sales is going to be enormous.
The philosophy of online brand management lies into the optimization of the brand content online. In order for firms to protect and enhance their brand visibility in the electronic environment they need first to apply best practices in order to optimize their brand content. These best practices of digital communications include search engine optimization (SEO), public relations, human resources, and related electronic content that is publicly available on the web as well as social media: text, images, audio, and video. Of course even if a firm follows all the above strategies that does not mean necessarily that they are in control, but at least it gives a head start.
When it comes to online brand management, firms need to be proactive. They must have a proactive monitoring campaign that will provide them with useful information of their different audiences. Proactivity is the answer to the online management troubles. If consumers are talking about our products or services on social media, we must take action on the spot in order to minimize the potential dangers. In today’s hyperconnected social world, if we just ignore the situation, it is not going to diffuse by itself. The risk of not responding to negative comments or conversations could be huge. A negative tweet or Facebook post that goes viral will do unimaginable damage to your brand’s reputation. There are tons of cases of brands getting destroyed or permanently scarred by either not responding to complaints online or responding back in a negative tone.
A question that may come in our mind is why we should manage our online brand reputation. The answer is quite simple. If our brand reputation is bad, then the consumers would not like to be associated with us. Our online reputation could easily create a strong brand, but at the same time it could destroy our firm over a night. An extremely easy way for the retailers to see their online reputation is simply to search over the Internet what is being said about them. Positive comments indicate a healthy firm and negative problems suggest actions for change. Of course all these negative comments should not be taken lightly. If there is a consumer who takes time to write even negative comments means that they want to be in a relation with our firm. If they didn’t care at all, they would not even spend time and effort to do that.
Social Media Enterprises
In the recent years we are witnessing the new era, in which the firms are focusing mainly on the online environment. In some cases they tend to focus only on the online environment, giving up completely the offline one. Some firms are concentrating not only on the world of Internet but more on the world of apps. Of course as we mentioned in previous chapters, just offering an app is not good enough for the SoLoMo consumer. As a firm, we need to use a collection of tools that are going to entice, engage, and track the customers. Creating a social enterprise is about being social for the greater good of the business, in order to increase the firms’ productivity and to lead to greater innovation.
We have witnessed numerous cases in which firms were inadequate in terms of communicating effectively the goals and the mission of the company internally. The dissemination of valuable information could take a long period of time in order to reach all the departments. Here is where a social media platform benefits the firm. The ability of transferring rapidly to the targeted internal audience valuable information among specific employee groups is one of the main benefits.
Just a few years ago, skepticism abounded over the place of enterprise social media. The greatest benefit is that the feedback that a social enterprise is getting is instant. For example, if a franchise retailer is doing two days sales promotion, the enterprise could easily have hourly updates through social platforms instead of waiting until the end of the day for a phone call or an e-mail from the franchise store. If enterprises didn’t have that immediate feedback they would continue to base their promotions on limited historical sales data. But in the above-mentioned scenario the social enterprise is maximizing the operational objective through improved effectiveness of a weekend sales campaign. In terms of actual implementation firms could use some of the shelf products like Yammer. Of course firms may need to modify it in order to ensure that employees are using the software in the most effective way. One of the main obstacles of adopting such software is the ongoing configuration and customization throughout the process in order to ensure that the software is meeting the need of the firms and is increasing the communication in between the departments.
The question now is how well these offerings serve the purposes of collaboration and business transparency. Deloitte’s recent survey (2014) on corporate culture suggests executives and employees are of distinctly differing opinions. For example, in the survey of 1,000 workers and 300 executives at US companies, 45% of executives said social media has a positive impact on their workplace culture, while only 27% of employees agreed. To protect the corporate brand, most large corporations have implemented social media policies to ensure that employees communicate appropriately across all social software channels. While social networking’s success among consumers is well-documented, enterprise social media tools are still struggling to gain a foothold in organizations because of the confusion over how to best apply the technology to business operations, and concerns that it could be a drain on worker productivity.
Closing Remarks
SoLoMo is not another marketing method. It is not even a breakthrough, contemporary marketing strategy. One can claim that today’s companies are actually using social media, local content, and mobile applications in their marketing plans. So what’s the fuss about SoLoMo? We see SoLoMo as an approach to embrace new technologies to meet consumers’ new needs.Thinking about SoLoMo helps us all in order to fine tune our marketing strategies. There are three simple questions that every marketing manager should ask while evaluating a marketing plan: Does it bring together the social, local, and mobile strengths of our product/service? Do we fully understand the SoLoMo needs of our consumers? Are we SoLoMo-ready? We are all SoLoMo after all!