We couldn’t have said it better ourselves than Jason Hahn did in this article for Chief Marketer:
[blockquote class=”alignleft”]”Location, location, location” isn’t just a statement about the three most important factors involved in buying real estate—it’s a reminder for business owners about the context all their marketing must have. [/blockquote]
The accompanying infographic to the article is pretty useful, too — in fact, any marketer who does place-based marketing, whether a brick-and-mortar retailer or an event marketer, needs to print this out and put it up in plain site, where they they review it every single day on the job.
The coming pervasiveness of technologies like iBeacon — a tech platform that includes an app iPhone users don’t even know is on their devices, but it’s lurking there on 200MM units, ready for Apple to leverage in attacking the how our mobile devices interact with our physical spaces and the “internet of things” — means marketers need to be totally abreast of how they exploit these technologies.
It’ll happen like this: there’ll be a soft, mounting rollout of technologies like iBeacon, initially only meaningful to the few early adopters…and then, suddenly, the transfiguration will happen nearly overnight. “Killer app” usages that make it simple and even profitable for consumers to engage with location-based technologies will be so normative, and profitable, that retailers and experiential marketers won’t be able to afford to not be using them.
The cost threshold is already so low, and the uses multiplying so rapidly, it’s up to marketers and agencies to get on board, and fast. Because if you’re not up to speed on location-based activation, it’ll be too late — one day it’ll be everywhere. And the laggards will be…well, nowhere.
