Pub. 2 2019-2020 |Issue 2

26 G reat marketing is the art of selling the right thing at the right time to the right person. For example, suppose it’s raining outside. You make a run from your car to the grocery store’s main entrance, wishing you’d thought to grab the umbrella sitting by your front door, and inside the store’s main entrance is an attractive display of colorful, practical and competitively priced umbrellas, thoughtfully positioned so that you cannot miss it. How likely are you to pick up one of those umbrellas? Depending on how hard it is raining, whether you have a waterproof coat and hat on, and your budget, the chances are good that you will end up buying an umbrella in addition to the milk and the tortillas you intended to get. Time and place are both important aspects of this kind of marketing. That same umbrella display, placed well away from the front entrance, would not be anywhere near as effective. It also wouldn’t be effective once the rain stopped. Success depends on recognizing that an ongoing rainstorm presents a business opportunity, and then acting on it in a way that won’t offend customers. Geo-targeting provides essentially the same marketing technique by using location data from, say, someone’s cellphone. Consider some possible cellphone applications, all of which would involve cellphones: • A potential customer goes to a car dealership and gets a discount offer either for that dealership or for the competitor across the street. • A woman goes to the mall. While she is walking toward the shoe department, she starts receiving information about her favorite brand of shoes. A half- hour later, after she purchases a pair of boots, the cellphone reminds her of her favorite restaurant at the same mall and lets her know takeout is 20% off. The technology is not that different from browsing the Crate & Barrel website from your computer and (thanks to cookies) suddenly being shown ads with a selection of the dinner plates you were browsing. When executed well, geo-targeting is a great technique for driving foot traffic, especially when you combine it with some knowledge about the people receiving your messages. For example, Denny’s repeat customers received two targeted mobile ad campaigns: “Build Your Own Skillet” increased in-store visits 11.6% and “Build Your Own French Toast increased in-store visits 34%. Customers were not necessarily close to the restaurants when they received the offer, but the campaigns were still effective because they targeted people who had been to the restaurant. As with any marketing technique, it’s possible to do geo-targeting wrong. Consider the example above of a woman who was shopping for shoes. Is she going to appreciate the fact that someone knows where she buys shoes and when she’s likely to want takeout? Or is she going to feel like a marketing department is stalking her? Equally, it Geo-targeting