Using services to increase consumption.
In 2004 we built a strategy for Sony upon the insight that iPod ownership increases consumption of music. Sitting in an airport bar after having been briefed by Sony on their Walkman challenge, we realised that a hidden result of having bought iPods was that we now listened to more music: more variety as well as a greater quantity. Owning an iPod, we said, increases your connection to music which leads to increased consumption.
While this seems a bit counter-intuitive given the constant declines in music sales, a number of key measures show consumption increasing, in terms of overall growth, and growth of music purchasers.
To me this is an example of how digital technology which has been designed to solve problems, sometimes ends up creating new opportunities instead.
I think we may be about to see this happening again with the mainstreaming of location-based services coming your way via the iPhone 3G and others. That’s because I believe location awareness isn’t simply a technology that prevents you from getting lost, it’s a technology that increases your confidence and desire to explore.
In many cities, knowledge of what’s nearby is just as hidden as knowledge of what’s on the other side of the planet. As a result I think we tend to tread the same paths over and over again, in fact I’d guess that the longer you live in a place, the smaller your actual footprint of usage is because your routes become habitual. This means that location-based services may actually be more compelling to those people close to home rather than those far from home and because we tend to spend more time close to home than not.
Geoff Says:
June 10th, 2008 at 4:35 pmIt does seem like the killer feature of recommendation services from Last.fm through Netflix is to introduce you to treasures you wouldn’t otherwise have found. The idea that location based services can help you chart out a more detailed map of your own local territory is a compelling one.
I’m looking forward to the mashups between attention data aggregators, recommendation engines, and location based services. e.g., I want to be able to rock up in Berlin, and automatically get a Google map with everything from clubs to design shops and everything in between, pre-filtered based on my previously expressed tastes, those of my trusted friends, and a few “hot trends” thrown in for serendipity’s sake.
I guess the only downside is for those people that do find that super cool obscure little coffee shop, it may not be obscure for very long…
Tony Burt Says:
June 13th, 2008 at 6:43 amIncreased “music consumption” of back catalog music I think you’ll find, that is, music that we already know and probably ripped in iTunes when we first unpacked our iPods. Seems people lie and are just inherently lazy when it comes to the discovery of new music, even though we’re given every opportunity to do so these days. We take tentative steps at the beginning but a lot end up where they began.
I too have been excited by the idea of location based services and the chance to explore the hidden gems in the vicinity of my London pad and beyond, but this will need to be combined with a strong community feature made up of ‘real’ friends and people I trust. MoSoSo’s have promised this for a while but still haven’t quite got it right yet.
Adrian Says:
June 13th, 2008 at 9:25 amAgreed, location-based data need to be combined with social data otherwise it’s just another yellow pages. Location-awareness is a platform. I think we’ll see a large number of different types of data mash ups. I’m really excited about what’s coming.