Point – Know – Buy

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Here’s trend watching’s February report which is worth a look as it shows how POINT-KNOW-BUY will reshape consumers’ info-expectations, search behavior and purchasing patterns.

Their definition of what  POINT-KNOW-BUY:

”With textual search and information now abundantly available to most people most of the time, the race is on to make instant visual search and information ubiquitous too. Any real world object (if not person) will soon be able to be ‘known’ by on-the-go consumers equipped with smart phones, which can be pointed at anything to retrieve/find related information on a whim. And yes, some commerce may follow from that as well.”

It’s packed full of great examples, for instance, ‘find my face’, the facial recognition tool that Google launched in December 2011, and

 Skinscan, an app which allows users to scan and monitor moles over time, with the aim of preventing malignant skin cancers.

Pinterest

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With all the excitement over pinterest recently I thought I’d share some interesting stats about the site which has just reached 11.7 million unique monthly users in the US, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.

In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest.

According to ComScore, the average Pinterest user spend 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. If you don’t count sites like Google+ or new Yahoo channels that have built in user bases, comScore’s data shows Pinterest would be the fastest site of any kind to hit 10 million monthly uniques in the U.S.

Click on this to read more.

Innocent Label Generator

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Here’s another great example of quirky marketing tactics by the Innocent Drinks brand.


People can go onto Innocent’s specially created Valentine’s microsite to personalize an Innocent Drinks’ bottle label with their very own message of love with matching graphics. The customized label can then be printed out and glued onto the bottle, before you “leave it on the doorstep of the one you love.” The bespoke label can also be shared on Facebook and Twitter.

Ah, how sweet…

Click on this link to have a go.

 

 

idea of the day: Musical dressing rooms

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A pilot scheme in Singapore has been playing around with different types of music in dressing rooms to see which increases the chances of a final sale. From a collection of 10,000 songs from 16 different genres a different song is played depending on what type of clothing is being tried and who is trying it on.

The system basically works with RFID chips affixed to the merchandise, an installed RFID reader in the dressing room, and directional speakers that go straight to the person trying on the clothing.

The above diagram presented at Midem by UK-based marketing firm Contagious, which actually put the concept (and network of clothing retailers) together for the Singapore-based StarHub Online Music Store.

And there’s a twist – whilst the person is trying stuff on StarHub sends an unsolicited, proximity based SMS to potential customers which includes the name of the song being played and lets the user instantly download the track for free.

However, the customer has no idea that the chip and reader are there….

Contagious, (who came up with the concept), noted that 84 percent of texts resulted in completed downloads, with a total of 47,000 downloads during the campaign. “The important thing is that the user isn’t aware of any of that technology,” said Contagious’ Will Sansom. “They aren’t asked to download anything, scan anything, opt-in to anything…”

Scarily intrusive or a great example of experimentation & learning?

http://digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120207dressing

Get real – via the telly…

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I was watching the telly the other night and it suddenly struck me that there are a huge number of telly programmes on-air right now we can use as an excellent source of dust.

For instance, The Hotel (a recent Channel 4 doc) couldn’t have been more useful in helping me reassess what holidays mean to a huge number of people in this country. While I’m busy fretting about having to organise a three-week trek through the Cambodian jungle, ending in a Bikram yoga retreat and communal massage session with some Tibetan monks, huge swathes of Brits are looking forward to a fortnight in resorts such as Torquay.

And rather than spending a couple of hundred quid on a hand-carved ivory snuff box bought from a man on the beach, they’re spending their hard-earned brass on simple pleasures – a nice plate of fish and chips and few beers of an evening. The way we plan to make better human connections with them has to be informed by a better understanding of how they enjoy themselves, right? BTW – I’ve been to Torquay on holiday several times, so this was a refresher, not something totally new.

So, why not check out the schedules and find some real stuff to watch. My immediate suggestions would be Confessions of a Nurse, Channel 4 on Tuesdays at 10pm and The Hotel on 4oD, One Born Every Minute etc.

If you work on a houswives, housewives with kids or f kids’ advertiser, check out Saturday mornings on any kids’ channel. You’ll see just how difficult it is for advertising to make any impact at all. The kids are bombarded with frenzied messages and the more anodyne adult spots look painfully out of context. It’s a mess.

And watch some daytime telly. It’s mind-bogglingly awful and brilliant in equal measure. Huge numbers of people who spend lots of money on our clients’ products watch it for hours in a stretch, so you need to know what it’s all about.