By Dr. Rado Kotorov, VP of Product Marketing, Information Builders
Mobile marketing technologies are evolving very quickly due to the wide adoption of mobile devices that allow for real-time engagement with the consumer, with features depending on the consumer’s exact location at a given time.
Hence, new marketing categories are emerging rapidly, such as location-based marketing, which pushes discounts and coupons to consumers via mobile devices based on the proximity of the consumer to a retail location. A recent article in Harvard Business Review titled, “Mobile Discounts: A Matter Of Distance And Time,” reports that correctly timed proximity discounts can increase the odds of a purchase by an eye-popping 76%.
The reason mobile marketing is so effective is because it spurs spontaneous purchases. Catching the consumer in the right moment and in the right place mixed with the right offer helps eliminate deliberation and makes the purchasing decision easy. And while this is true for many suggestions, such as discounts on movie tickets or at restaurants, other purchasing decisions cannot be made without some deliberation.
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For example, clothing purchases take more deliberation and frequently involve getting advice from close friends. So how can retailers capitalize on mobile marketing and trigger more spontaneous purchases for areas that typically require more deliberation? My prediction is that the next big category in mobile marketing to emerge will solve this problem. I call it “peersuasion” marketing, i.e., let the consumer’s peers persuade the decision. Full disclosure: I did not come up with the term “peersuasion”— it was coined by my 15-year-old daughter. She often tries things at stores, takes selfies and sends them to her friends. Then she’ll walk around while waiting for the advice of her friends before making a decision.
The more I thought about this, the more I realized that people have always socialized their decisions with their peers, whose advice deeply influences the outcome.
As I watched a man taking a selfie while trying a jacket in a store in New York City, I asked the sales associate to explain to me the behavior. He replied, “They have to ask their girlfriends or wives. We are tribal creatures; the tribe always decides.”
He added that in his view, about 20% of the store’s visitors take and send selfies to get advice. Then he continued to tell me that in his opinion, if a shopper took the time to take a selfie, the odds of buying increase by 50%.
So, while a year ago the store personnel was discouraging people from taking pictures, now they actively encourage people to do so and to share them with their significant others, friends and social networks. If stores can motivate visitors to use selfies to solicit peer advice, they have a tremendous opportunity to drive double-digit conversions.
With social gamification, retailers can provide the incentives for consumers to do exactly that. As an example, a sales associate can offer to take a photo of the customer with the clothing or item in question, and send it to the customer to share it with his or her friends. With the photo, he also sends the customer a sharable offer with a built-in discount contingent on the customer’s friends’ advice.
One way to do this is to increase the discount based on the number of friends that like the item — within limits of course. This little game opens the door for a personal conversation with the sales associate, makes it fun to share, and is a win/win situation for both the consumer and the retailer. The consumer gets the assurance from his or her peers and a discount, thus making the purchase far more gratifying. The retailer gets an incremental sale especially if the consumer is hesitant. But more importantly, the retailer gets awareness exposure to the friends of the consumer. Even better, the retailer has created a personal relationship with the consumer and can better curate personalized recommendations in the future.
And what if the consumer has “liked” many things but purchased just one? Why not send him or her socially gamified offers for all the items that have been liked? Thus the consumer can be convinced by the opinions of his or her friends and purchase at a later time, giving the retailer even more incremental sales.
Peersuasion marketing can give the retailer an opportunity to increase the odds of converting a sale by leveraging the mobile device to engage the consumer’s peers and influence the outcome. While the behavior of taking selfies is becoming a regular habit for many consumers, getting the right apps and user experience (UX) for peersuasion marketing is key for success. If done correctly, it can break the mold of the brick-and-mortar shopping experience to incorporate the social circles of the consumers, thus making in-store shopping more dynamic, interactive and fun.
Dr. Rado Kotorov is VP of Product Marketing for Information Builders and works both with the Business Intelligence and the iWay product divisions to provide thought leadership, analyze market and technology trends, aid in the development of innovative product roadmaps, and create rich programs to drive adoption of BI, analytics, data integrity, and integration technologies. He strives to make BI and business analytics more accessible, intuitive, and collaborative through the adoption of innovative Web 2.0, advanced visualization, predictive modeling, search, and mobile technologies.
