Oh, believe me, we’ll get to location. But, like yesterday’s post on touch and touchless, we’ve got some smaller fish to fry first.
In the meantime, let’s check in on our Hometown’s Hero trend (and regional marketing in general). We’ve spoken at length about the opportunity for brands to help consumers learn more about their communities, whether it’s through exploring places of interest via Foursquare or checking out a curated list of Google’s (QR-coded) favorite places.
One way to think of this knowledge is, to borrow from Rachel Weidinger (who borrowed from a Brian Eno essay), to ask the following question: How big is your “here?” In other words, how much of a connection do you (the consumer) really feel to the community? Weidinger approaches this question from the perspective of local food, and she presented a series of questions that test one’s expertise on his or her “here.” Some examples:
- Can you point north?
- How many feet above sea level are you?
- From what direction do storms normally come?
- Can you name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available?
Don’t feel bad; after six years in Chicago, I could only get the first one. (Fun fact: Chicago is, on average, 579 feet above sea level.) The point, though, is that consumers are increasingly hungry (intended puns, two days in a row!) for information that helps them eat locally and responsibly. Or, in the words of Weidinger-Eno, they need tools to “big” their “here.” They need tools like the Locavore iPhone app (demoed in the video above), which provides consumers with information on local farmers’ markets, the seasonality and origin of different foods, and more. Or, the Seafood Watch iPhone app, which lets you compare fish to determine which choices are most ecologically friendly (taking into account your current location).
Admittedly, these are probably not the kind of apps that a giant marketer like Kraft should be offering, but they teach some valuable lessons about the kind of information consumers are seeking out. Perhaps future iterations of Kraft’s enormously successful iFood Assistant should offer a filter to help consumers choose more locally-sourced foods for their recipes, if they prefer. Clearly, this is a great way to connect with a Niche Network, but there’s also an opportunity to provide value to the consumer to keep them from trading down to generics. After all, in a world of Ubiquitous Connoisseurship, this is increasingly becoming the kind of information that all consumers are considering when they’re shopping.
More SXSWi coverage tomorrow!
[On an unrelated note, Weidinger shared some stats about the Red Cross texting campaign for Haiti, which we covered in a previous post. For those who are interested, mGive processed $37 million for Haiti in just three weeks of the campaign. Of the 2.3 million tweets with the words “Haiti” or “Red Cross” between January 12th and 14th, just under 190,000 of those tweets included the fundraiser's SMS number (90999). More about these numbers at Joe Gray's blog.]
