Opinion Piece: Future technology in marketing
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Future technology in marketing Ian Pearson Received (in revised form): 1 September 2003
Keywords: RFID tags, locationbased services, cyberspace, augmented reality, head-up display, lifestyle marketing
Ian Pearson Orion 3.7.4 Adastral Park Martlesham Heath Ipswich IP5 3RE, UK Tel: +44 (0)1473 642900 Fax: +44 (0)1473 644649 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.btinternet.com/ ian.pearson
Marketing has very fuzzy edges. All kinds of activities can stimulate markets, often unintentionally. To take a simple example, hackers act as unpaid marketers for McAfee, by stimulating demand for their anti-virus products. And in the future, marketing will get even fuzzier as new technologies open up new ways to promote products and services. Let us take some topical examples, starting with 3G mobile networks. These are expected to allow people to receive information that is relevant to their location, among other services. So, for example, pizza houses could let previous customers know of special offers as they approach the restaurant, and so on. Personally, I am sceptical about these kinds of services. They may well irritate rather than attract customers once the initial novelty has worn off. Most will be about as welcome as junk e-mails and, as such, are likely to be disabled by customers. Other 3G services based on the customer’s profile — including interests and preferences, as well as location — might be more acceptable provided that they work primarily for the benefit of the customer rather than the marketer. Pull advertising might work, but push advertising will, I suspect, fail. Customers will pay to get information they want, but not for information they did not ask for. Another up-and-coming technology is the radio frequency tag. Costing only a few cents, these tags can store the identity of any object and make the information accessible to any suitably equipped device, including those connected to the internet. In a store, customers could look at an object and, instead of having to ask a sales assistant for information, could find out all about it through, for example, an online display located nearby. Customers could also be identified by other tags built into their loyalty cards, so the system could also make sure it presented information tailored to each customer’s interest. Advances like these will obviously have an impact on marketing precision when it comes to adapting the messages marketers target at different customers. But by adding cyberspace functionality to any object, they can also open whole new markets. It is suddenly as if an object has two separate lives — one in the real world and one in the computer. Take jelly babies as an example. Imagine eating one. Now imagine eating a future jelly baby enhanced with an edible electronic tag. This allows the jelly baby to scream (through your PC speakers or Bluetooth headphones), and fight back. It could link to its friends on a peer-to-peer network, and organise a denial of service attack on your home PC, or launch a virus and trash your hard drive. Jelly
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