Beacon-Based Consumer Influence Analytics
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing digital marketing profiles primarily focus on online activities, neglecting offline consumer interactions, which are crucial for understanding consumer influence and behavior, especially since many retail sales occur offline and offline activities significantly impact purchase decisions.
Innovation Solution
Implementing beacon technology in retail outlets and other venues to observe and record consumer interactions, creating a more comprehensive consumer profile that includes offline activities, and using influence graphs to analyze how consumers influence each other, allowing for targeted marketing efforts.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If digital marketing profiles focus only on online activities, then online consumer behavior can be tracked, but offline consumer interactions are neglected leading to incomplete consumer understanding
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines online and offline consumer data collection systems into a unified consumer profile. Beacons deployed in physical retail locations track offline consumer interactions, while online activities are captured through existing digital marketing tools. These separate data streams are merged to create a comprehensive consumer profile that reflects both online and offline behaviors, resolving the contradiction between tracking online precision and capturing offline information.
2Loss of information
If beacon technology is deployed to track offline consumer interactions, then comprehensive consumer profiles can be created, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The beacon system is designed to perform multiple functions: tracking consumer location, identifying visited retail locations, recording interaction duration, and capturing product interest data. By making the beacon system multi-functional, the patent reduces the need for separate tracking devices and systems, thereby managing complexity while achieving comprehensive data collection.
Solution Approach 2:
The system leverages consumers' existing smartphones and mobile devices to perform tracking functions. The beacons communicate with consumers' own devices, which automatically record and transmit interaction data without requiring additional hardware for the consumer. This self-service approach reduces system complexity by utilizing resources already available to the consumer.
3Productivity
If comprehensive consumer profiles including offline activities are created, then targeted marketing can be improved, but data processing requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system continuously collects and pre-processes consumer data from both online and offline sources, maintaining updated consumer profiles in real-time rather than processing data only when needed for marketing campaigns. This preliminary action ensures that comprehensive consumer profiles are already prepared and available when marketing targeting is required, reducing processing time during actual marketing operations.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback loops where consumer interactions with marketing solicitations (both online and offline) are tracked and used to continuously refine consumer profiles. This feedback mechanism allows the system to learn from consumer responses and improve targeting accuracy over time, making the increased data processing capability more efficient and productive.
Data Source
AI summary
Offline consumer behavior and interactions are observed using beacons positioned at venues where consumers spend time and interact with each other. The beacons communicate with mobile computing devices that are carried by the observed consumers. The observed consumer behavior provides actionable insights into how consumers influence each other. For example, the people that a particular consumer spends time with form a “circle of influence” associated with that consumer. If the consumer makes a purchase, members of the circle of influence are observed to understand the degree to which they were influenced by the purchase, if at all. Metrics that quantify a consumer's influence over other consumers allow marketers to more effectively target both the influencing and influenced consumers. Also, if relatively little information is known about a particular consumer, that consumer's digital marketing profile can be supplemented using information known about the consumers with whom he/she often spends time.