iBeacons: a bird's-eye view on 2016 trends

In this post I'll take a look at the iBeacon trend. 

iBeacon is a new technology brought by Apple to facilitate interactions between mobile apps and the physical world using a new variation of the bluetooth signal that spend less energy and not need any pairing action between the devices. This solution is part of the IoT (Internet of Things) movement to provide more integration among devices seamlessly and without much of user effort.   

The iBeacon term is therefore used for a lot of designations, meaning nowadays not only the Apple solution, but it's derivatives solutions and copycats, also could be used to state anything about the software protocol, the complete marketing solution or its singular device that is the center piece of the solution: a stand alone coin sized hardware device that emits "the beacon", a low-energy Bluetooth signal that is sensed by mobile apps if they are coded using Apple's SDK, a piece of standardized software that interprets the iBeacon signal and needs to be inside the mobile app code, available for both iOS and Android models.

Following are one example of how a complete iBeacon solution might work for your company (image from Rover) and which is typically the software and services sold by many companies alike in the market.

This new technology was conceived to make it easier for companies to integrate brick-and-mortar stores to their internet content and applications.To understand more about this new technology and how they could foster omni-channel marketing strategies, please visit here


Let's now take a look at Google trend topics about iBeacon and its protocol competitor from Google, the EddyStone.


i. Change in interest over Time


Since its first appearance in 2013 we see a clear peak a year later by July/2014 and so far the interested is clearing decreasing, mostly because of a unclear vendor segmentation, some lack of standard and quality in the beacon hardware products and lack of user traction, in a few words: you need to have beacons installed in your store, a mobile app iBeacon enabled and the app downloaded to the user phone with a internet connection that when passing by your door they receive a notification. Some barriers need to be broke and perhaps EddyStone, that is seen to be rising (in the moment that iBeacon is falling), could be the answer. The Eddystone protocol will be native integrated with the Android OS, it means there's no need to have an specific app to launch.

 ii. Regional Interests


Seams China and India is currently the countries that is focusing the most on iBeacons (at least in the Google search), perhaps because as hardware providers, they see an opportunity to make it big producing large scale mini devices (they are specialized in that) at lower prices - as pricing is (at least here in Brazil) the major barrier for the beacons to become more established for commercial use. Making a rough comparison, in Brazil (due to taxes) a beacon will cost almost 100% of it's original price, making very hard to sell the solution to retailers and others.
iii. Related Searches



Taking a look at the related searches, despite the obvious keyword variations about ibeacons, beacons, android and apple, we can see clearly the top ibeacon solution provider at the momento: 'Estimote'. With a clear business model, they sell fancy beacons with a much more understandable and usabel (by software developers) SDK  with a freemium business model to facilitate developers and business users to start using beacon solutions. Visit Estimote here.

If you need more information about iBeacon in Brazil, look for Smartcon.Mobi 

Customer behavior shifts during Brazil's recession

The last couple years in Brazil's economy was presenting a real challenge for all its population, from lower to higher classes the optimism about 'good times to come' is lowering by the month.

Even the joy of the samba people is not resisting this time of recession and political challenges, making 72% of the population worried about losing their job in the next year. [more details]

This survey shows a consumer behavior shift in Brazil that is becoming different from other countries that faced similar recession and/or political crisis in recent history. These peculiarities, if well understood and assessed, could become real opportunities for retail companies.


The 5 main customer behavior shifts in Brazil



1. Let the searching for savings begins


75% of the population are actively looking for sales, making the decision to buy even if they need to wait for a promotion campaign or sales seasoning, expending time and shopping multiple brands to if it represents the best deal. [more details]


2. Brand loyalty? Only poured with sales

33% didn't abandon their brands, but they are buying in (19%) smaller quantities or (14%)  awating for promotion coupons or some sales to purchase.[more details]


3. Watch me now, cause I'm going down

21% of consumers traded down to less expensive products and 60% don't intend to go back even if the tides were turned. For those among A to AA class brands the note is clear: you already lost 12% of your customer base.[more details]

4. Beer and make-up to the help

5% of consumers are trading up, but only in certain categories like beers (15%) and beauty and cosmetics (9%). They stated that this categories cheaper is directly related to lower quality.

5. Atacarejo is key. 

Consumers are changing channels to discounts chains and cash-a-carry formats, the 'Atacarejo' (combining Retail and Wholesale), One bad news here (for me and my peers) is that online commerce is gaining too much traction as channel in the present context.

Some ideas to start...


Clear understand of your customer demographics and segmentation, reaching them where they are more sensitive. Coupons, sales offerings, added-value products and ad campaigns need to be aimed correctly, if not, they could end in losing customers rather than just company budget. 

Analytics investments is key, as stated above, now its the proper time to hire some good analytics professional and dig deeper on very granular data to reach for that 20% singular segment of customer that could end up valuing more than the 80% of the total 'sales looking pumas' around in this jungle days of recession.

Full stack of products and prices, being clear in your value proposition and stating a transparent price structure position could be a winner in presenting a trade-off in quality and price that could reach down and up-traders in their best intentions, not hurting any brand image and making customer identification.

Eficiency, Efiency, Efiency. This is such a cliche theme that needles to say, specially in times like these, efiency will bring not just low cost of operations that also improve the quality of our work making more valuable products and services becoming a loop of positive events that will drive excellence in results and further better brand positioning.


Source: McKinsey Global Consumer Sentiment Survey 2016.

Key issues on starting your Web Analytics journey

Greetings dear reader. I'm proudly to present my very first post on my blog called "The Frenetic Thinker". I'll intend to write weekly about web analytics, ecommerce, digital marketing, gamification and customer online behavior.
Lots of subjective and objective information is constantly thrown at us, and most of it we don't have a spare time to think deeply on it. So this blog's posts is my bird-eyes view on those subjects wherever they appear critical for my businesses and it's likely to help others.

I'll start with one of my favorite subjects: Web Analytics!

Prior to post about anything technical, those are the 4 key issues that most companies suffer when initiating or sustaining an web analytics initiative.

Consider to create an action plan for each of these key issues and keep updating, revising and acting - like any continuous improvement process - because this issues will not just disappear suddenly, it needs to be incorporated in the 'everyday habits' of our web analytics teams.

1. 'WHY over WHAT' (or Analysis over Reports) 

For every bunch of numbers that is trying to explain 'WHAT' is going on, there 'must have' a little box on the top with a explanation to 'WHY' this happened. This is what I've been calling a 'WOW Report' (WHY over WHAT).

To report, is the act of presenting data and it's powerful to understand what is and what is not in a quantitative way, for example, which page has more visits, the number of hits of a button on a landing page, number of conversion rates, load page times, percentage of website abandon and others.

But data alone is not good at all to present us with why these events happened in that way in our website.

To achieve this conclusion you need to sit back, relax, and merge all those data to forge, in a meaningful and categorized way, a qualitative information about, for example, why those customer are abandoning the cart, why they hit the home and leave the website, why my revenue per click is low at certain periods and for certain customers.

With the 'sea of data' that we had upon us, meetings, e-mails everyday and every hour, we need to embody a culture of analysis in every level of our company. Think just now: how many reports you read and write today was a 'WOW Report'?

Even if it leads to a simple and rather superficial analysis for some reports, it will help us all on reinforce the culture of analysis over just send away numbers, it'll improve the ones search for data relevance and relation, it'll leverage an earlier data categorization and broaden understanding, fastening upcoming wider and/or deeper data analysis.

Quoting Avinash Kaushik (Google co-founder and Digital Marketing Evangelist):

No company will succeed by having a army of report writers, they will succeed by having a small group of "Analysis Ninja's " who transform data into information. If you get just data, reject it and reject the person who gave it to you.

2. 'PEOPLE over TOOLS'

"Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor", using a Marvel's comic book quote (written in the side of Mjolnir, the hammer of character Thor), it brings us a simple rather good though: Neither the most powerful tool in the world will produce results when is not handled by the best people.

 

For people and tools, we need to establish, on a budget basis, a 10/90 rule of thumb.For every $10 spent in tools, reserve $90 to spend in people analyzing the data resulting from those tools.

There's a huge amount of data in our websites today and the tools has power to provided much more data, putting pressure and how fast and accurate we'll deliver the information behind all of that and for this ultimate task we will only survive with the best people. 

All of the paid and free tools available offer 80% of the same data, so what will make the difference here is if we have the best people for it, remembering that with the 'worthy' people, tools will never be a limit.

Remember that in a Web Analitycs team you'll need to have 3 distinct functions to be executed by on or more professionals (depending on the size and budget of your company). These 3 functions are well described by Michael Fassnatch in the Marketing Geek blog:

• Data Strategist. This is someone who doesn’t need to be a statistician but someone with strong marketing strategy capabilities and high data affinity. This person is the bridge between the analytical hard core geek and the rest of the world
• Techie. Someone needs to own the build out and implementation of the necessary underlying data infrastructure and applications. This techie needs constant communication with the data strategist to ensure that he is not developing anything off strategy. It’s all about rapid development with instant feedback loops. No development should take more than a couple of days before immediate review by the rest of the team.
• Data Designer. Here we need someone with strong creative background who is able to transform data insights into innovative visuals with meaning. This person is the most difficult to find and challenging to train. There are not too many role models out there, it’s a totally new discipline that we have to define over the next years.

source: http://marketinggeek.blogspot.com.br/search?q=data+visualization+practice

3. FAIL FAST

When we're kids, learning to walk, the high is low, so the pain is bearable and the losses are minimum. So fail fast, right in the earlier stages of any experimentation.

Needles to add that the failure in the web world is cheap. So experimentation is (almost) free of charge and need none to little boldness to do it.

We have a lot of strategies to change and learn a lot in our websites with no harm to our numbers.
But prepare yourself far ahead to do that experiences, because we need to not only fail fast but we need to learn fast too.

Attention to which data you're looking at each new idea will you try to now be failing with no lessons to be learned - this is a mistake that is not allowed here - preparation, preparation, preparation.

I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.
- Corazon Aquino

4. NEITHER HARD NOR EASY

Don't take web analytics by some tweaks here and there in your website's home page or in the checkout process, but also not let you believe that gather information from a mass of data is  rocket science.

For anything to present a valuable result we need effort, dedication, inspiration and preparation, but don't expect that you need months for your first results in your website.

Jump start in this posting from Avinash Kaushik and see for yourself... you'll probably will get some results in less than a day!

FINAL WORDS

I wish you all the best in your web analytics journey, keep tune for more postings and to summarize in a phrase all this post, it will be something like:

Hire the best and fittest people to the job, assure that everyone is information oriented, start in your trials today to fail as fast as you can and make sure that all is been recorded for further learning and improvement.

...and thanks for being here!