Five Geo-Marketing Platforms for National Brands

Increasingly, major brands like Vicks and Nestlé are using location-based marketing platforms to help direct consumers where to buy their products.

Here from Streetfight are five platforms for  brands a way to take advantage of location-based services technology .

1. JiWire’s Compass: Brands such as Clinique, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, and Jeep utilize real-time product availability data to point consumers toward local retailers that currently have their products in stock.

2. Point Inside: Sprint, Clear Channel, and Meijer use indoor mapping technology to identify consumers’ “micro-locations” inside stores.

3. inMarket: Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Nestlé, and Unilever has used inMarket apps CheckPointsExtra! Extra!, and List Bliss to target geographic regions, specific retail chains, or individual stores.

4. Swirl: The Swirl mobile app lets consumers “follow” their favorite brands and notifies them when they’re close to retailers like Nordstrom, Macy’s, and Old Navy having sales.

5. Foursquare: Marketers like MTV, Bravo, and People have their own “brand pages” with content and location tips.

 

Big Data and the Local Mobile Promise

Local content and ad delivery continue to get smarter with more context around people, places and how they’re connected, says Michael Boland of BIA/Kelsey.

With smartphone penetration breaking the 50 percent barrier, there is an explosion in geo-data, and various alternatives are emerging to make sense of it.

One approach getting traction is to combine location data with “Big Data” on users (demographic, behaviorial, historical) and contextual data to help marketers extract more useful information.  Examples are Localeze, Sense Networks, PlaceIQ, Placed, Locu, Factual, Urban Mapping, and mobile local ad networks xAd, WHEREads, JiWire.

Read more here.  Are there other approaches possible?  A topic for another day…

October 22 update:  Mike Boland provides an update on the some of the players here.