News and Analysis
Do Cashierless Stores Present a Privacy Risk to Consumers?
Amazon’s convenience stores rely heavily on location technology to track consumers’ movements inside buildings. Cameras analyze shopping behaviors, strategically placed microphones listen to conversations, and information about consumers’ shopping habits is stored in a central database that Amazon can reference for future operational and strategic planning.
“As cashierless stores take off, more and more personal and payment data will be transmitted through phones and mobiles devices and stored in cloud-based software platforms,” says Ruston Miles, chief strategy officer at Bluefin. “This means that hackers will have more network access to this data through vulnerable providers and merchants.”
Why and How Often Consumers Share Location Data
Location is among the types of data consumers are most likely to weigh disclosing based on the utility of the scenario. Asked about eight different types of data, including marital status, social security number, and physical address, a higher percentage of survey respondents said whether they’ll share location data “depends” on the situation than for any other category. It’s neither an automatic yes or no; companies need to make a case.
Back to Basics: Data Collection in the New Privacy Era
Some widely used marketing methods, like firmographics and psychographics, are coming to a halt as brands are forced to consider whether consumers actually want to receive their messages. In place of those practices, marketers are returning to older forms of data collection to once again create differentiated customer experiences, explains Dawn Colossi, chief marketing officer at the market research technology company FocusVision.
“I think with digital transformation came the notion that brand marketing didn’t matter as much because you could just target your audience,” says Colossi. “But with limitations on targeting and spamming, getting your brand known for things that customers care about—and this comes from understanding how they think and feel—will be crucial for marketers.”
Commentary
What Happens If Facebook Gets Serious About Local?
What Google is to search, Facebook is to social. Those same local business owners know that, when it comes to social marketing, a good portion of their success depends on what they and their customers do on Facebook. So if Facebook gets serious about local, could that change the local landscape? What would it look like?
Latest Posts
Factual’s Rob Jonas: Location Tech Still Has Some Big Problems to Solve
Factual has been working over the past year to build out location data partnerships with a variety of agencies and brands. We recently caught up with Rob Jonas, the company’s SVP of revenue, to talk about where Factual sees local heading and why the location data space isn’t as crowded as general adtech.
7 Ways National Brands Can Localize Email Marketing Campaigns
Going local with an email campaign can be as simple as segmenting lists by city and including the addresses of local stores or as involved as editing the copy to reflect regional purchasing trends and language dialects. The end goal remains the same: to ground the business in the local community and give customers a sense of trust.
After the Brand Battle: The Final Score
The nine Brand Battles demonstrated true commitment to local branding by nearly all of the companies that competed – but fights over best data quality, superior customer engagement and reviews were intense, and the scores were close. Out of the five areas where Brandify collected data, the point of attack in local SEO and advertising proved that a clear strategy equals clear winners…
Street Fight Daily: Lyft Disputes Sale Report, OpenStreetMap Debuts Crowdsourced Street View
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Factual’s Rob Jonas: Location Tech Still Has Some Big Problems to Solve… Lyft President Says Company Was Never Looking for a Buyer… Many Businesses Can’t Assess the Digital Customer’s Experience…
New Data Shows National Marketers Want to Place Dollars in Local Media
National marketers care an awful lot about local media, and they put stock in some of the traditional channels such as radio and print, but they’re shifting dollars and interest toward digital innovations. Local media have a big opportunity to leverage their local context and relationships, and lead national marketers into digital waters. In other words, they can take the dollars for local media, plus capture the continued expansion of budget for online initiatives…
Street Fight Daily: Lyft Seeks a Buyer Without Success, Google Expands Local Business Cards
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Lyft is Said to Be Seeking a Buyer, Without Success… Google Local Business Cards or Posts About to Roll Out to Thousands of SMBs… How the Wall Street Journal Plans to Reach 3 Million Subscribers…
Case Study: Harley-Davidson Dealers Push to Grow Mobile Database
When marketers discuss the effectiveness of email and SMS campaigns, the size of a company’s customer database can play just as significant a role in the success or failure of a given campaign. That was one of the challenges faced by Calculated Risk Motorcycle Group, a management company for six Harley-Davidson dealerships.
Give Placed Your Location, and the Company Will Give You Frequent Flyer Miles
Location analytics firm Placed today is launching a new app that allows consumers to share their location data in exchange for frequent flyer miles. The Frequent Flyer app, with its explicit value exchange for consumers, has the potential to show how effective mobile ads can be in driving in-store purchases.
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