Do you ever have the feeling that someone is watching you?
If you open up your location permissions in your mobile devices, you can see what apps are currently tracking your location. For an average phone user like myself, I currently enabled 19 out of 40 apps to track my location. It’s fascinating how many years ago we were reluctant to provide our addresses to businesses, to now, allowing businesses to track us whenever our phone is turned on.
But why are these apps and businesses asking us to share our location? This allows for marketers to implement what we know as “Proximity marketing”, and 75% of 253 global marketers including big name companies Starbucks, BMW and Coca-Cola suggest that proximity marketing will play a crucial role in their business.
According to Harvard Business Review, retailers have experienced a 15% increase in foot traffic and 73% increase in the likelihood of consumer purchase due to beacon placements in their brick-and-mortar store. This beacon technology (discussed in the McDonald’s post) uses sensors that detect consumers who are near the store who have opted to allow alerts promoting these certain stores.
Marketing Implications
Obtaining location-based data is easy, however getting consumers permission to access their location-based data can be difficult. Whilst most consumers crave for a more personalized shopping experience with real-time promotions, many consumers still don’t want brands to track their location. This dilemma gave birth to Microsoft’s “The Consumer Data Value Exchange” research which discovered that 99.6% of consumers would share data for cash rewards and 89.3% would share data for location-based discounts. In general, we can see consumers are beginning to become more comfortable trading their privacy for monetary rewards.
But is the risk of our privacy worth it the beneficial convenience we exhibit? Will you allow brands to know or detect your location?
Leave your comments down below!
Andy's Digital Perspective 
This is quite cool! I remember only a few years ago, not just for privacy reasons, but also for battery reasons, I used to find it weird to keep my location services on. But currently, I would say I am also among the 99.6% of consumers in the Microsoft study. I wonder if there is anything left that companies still don’t know about us or can’t track?
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That is very true. It feels like companies know everything about us. It’s both advantageous and disadvantageous for us as consumers.
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Great Post! Proximity marketing can cool and creepy at the same time. Its interesting to see that major companies such as BMW and Coca-Cola also use this tool.
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It’s weird how we find it creepy at the start, but once we realize the benefits overcome the negatives, we become more welcoming to these types of technology. But it’s important that marketers and tech innovators don’t cross the line,
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This is super interesting! I’m personally comfortable with letting apps know my locations, but I have them set to “only when I am using the app”. I wonder what kind of difference having that particular setting makes
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That’s something I should consider doing as well, as I do have some privacy concerns. And I guess they have this option for users who are skeptical about businesses knowing your locations at all times, therefore have to compromise in order to gain consent from users who are skeptical, or who are on the fence.
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