Drillbits Blog

Checking In With Location-Based Marketing

We’ve come to love location-based marketing here at Brandware, and the fact that a few of our favorite lunch spots around the office share FourSquare discounts doesn’t hurt, either.

FourSquare may be the most buzzed-about geo-marketing service on the internet right now, but it’s certainly not the only one, and three of the five mentioned below actually have more users. Most utilize a mobile “check in” system like FourSquare’s, which rewards users for registering an arrival at a store, restaurant, or another kind of business. Here are few cool ways that brands are making use of mobile marketing today:

Olay and Booyah

For customized Olay skin care tips, Booyah’s MyTown users need only check into a participating pharmacy. MyTown serves up a survey that, in the end, produce a specific Olay skin care recommendation for the user.

Booyah CEO Keith Lee noted that the quizzes end by asking if the experience influenced the user about buying a skin cream. “The data shows that purchase intent increases [dramatically],” Lee said. “The experience Olay wanted was to have people walk into a store and actually tell them what skin cream best fits each person.”

Gap Rewards Loopt Check-ins With Discount

Gap uses Loopt to offer a 25 percent discount for users that check in twice at one of the retailer’s locations. Since June 1, as part of a new rewards program called Loopt Star, Gap store patrons can present a digital code to get the discount. While Loopt has 3 million users and is available on most handheld devices, the rewards program is currently only available as an iPhone app.

Sam Altman, CEO of the Mountain View, CA-based Loopt, said that “every Gap in the U.S.” was participating in the campaign. Other brands that have used the rewards program this month include Burger King, Starbucks, and Universal Music Group, Altman said. When addressing marketers using Loopt Star, he added, “We will have a self-service platform soon.”

Starbucks Entices Users with BrightKite

Starbucks already makes use of Loopt and FourSquare, and now they’ve taken a dive into Brightkite as well. Users can check into their local Starbucks in an attempt to earn the Frappuccino badge, and Brightkite sends out timed offers to entice users to swing by the ‘Bucks to grab mid-morning and mid-afternoon drinks.

More than that, though, Starbucks has also targeted its competitors with the service. Brightkite users (2 million) who check-in at other coffee shops – chains like Dunkin’ Donuts as well as independents’ have been receiving Starbucks messages and special offers, said Rob Lawson, CMO for the Burlingame, CA-based Brightkite. Lawson said store visitors that check-in during morning hours have also received timed offers around mid-afternoon from Starbucks.”Day-parts coupled with geo-location targeting, I think, is working well for the brand,” he said.

USA Today Jet-sets Via Gowalla

Gowalla users can enjoy travel tips from USA Today each time they check into a major airport between now and Labor Day. Participating cities include New York, Atlanta, Seattle, Houston, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Philadelphia and D.C..

USA Today will provide Gowalla users with 10 places to visit in each city, as well as airline and airport news for the paper’s “Today in the Sky” online section.

Pepsi and Stickybits

Stickybits is a geo-social system that allows users to check into brands and products, rather than physical locations. Pepsi is the company’s first official partner, and with a quick snapshot of your drink’s barcode, you can see tips and tricks from Pepsi, as well as a comments left by other fans of the product.

The widespread adoption of smartphones has added fuel to location-based marketing’s fire, and big brands have caught on quickly. We see an untapped opportunity for brand communication here, where consumers and their favorite things engage one another to create better customer service, stronger products and smarter businesses. The real questions become these: How long will this trend last, and will it evolve into something beyond coupon-based advertising? 

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Tagged advertising, branding strategy, foursquare, Marketing, social marketing, social media