Category: Geolocation Technology

ABI has released a report that says that a new type of sensor fusion that is rare today will be commonplace soon.

ABI Research has now released a report that looks quite promising for companies that have been considering the use of location based marketing, as they have said that geolocation sensor fusion remains “very much a rarity on smartphones today,” but that this will be changing in the near future.

The report said that by 2019 the market for this technology will be tremendous due to usage trends.

It explained that trends toward local search, health, retail, personal asset tracking, and connected home apps will spread geolocation based tech massively by 2019. This will open up a practically limitless number of doors for location based marketing technology providers and users. Patrick Connolly, a senior analyst from ABI Research, explained that “Conditions are perfect for disruptive new entrants.”

ABI Research feels that the technology that will drive location based marketing is about to take off.

Connolly went on to explain that “All major sensor IC vendors have identified location-based sensor fusion as important, yet InvenSense is the only company to actively invest in this area. This lack of priority is driven by a short-term demand issue, as the indoor ecosystem is not evolved enough to warrant major developer interest.” The result, he said, will be that there will be a “void”, as that application starts to explode over the next couple of years.

GNSS IC vendors and startups will, says ABI Research, be able to take advantage of a considerable chance for meeting this demand. That said, it should be pointed out that unlike the market for IC, where there is a single position for which everybody must compete, it is the belief of ABI Research that smartphones will run a number of different indoor geolocation technologies for various apps and purposes.

Connolly explained that this environment is unique in its potential for competition, which is made even more complex by vendors such as Apple, that like to develop their own geolocation sensor fusion solutions as a component of an “always-on ubiquitous offering”. As a result of the disruption that this will cause, competition will develop and it will form a chance for equal measures.

Location based marketing companies will be provided with an array of choices with which they will then be able to engage consumers.

The massive corporation is using this offline shopper data collection to target mobile ads.

Unilever is now using location based marketing techniques to be able to better understand how appealing shoppers find its brands while they are in store, so that they can later send mobile ads that will be relevant to those individual consumers.

The company will be using iBeacons to be able to glean the information about the smartphone using consumers.

The idea is that while this type of location based marketing could encourage purchases at the point of sale, it can also be used for a broader purpose. This is primarily to use the technology to lower the consumer acquisition cost by providing each individual with content that has been customized to a consumer’s individual interests, wants, and needs.

Unilever entered into a location based marketing partnership in order to be able to test this concept.

In this geolocation technology using effort, Unilever is working with Glimr, a data specialist firm, and Mindshare. This strategy steps away from the “traditional” use of beacons, which have been conducted by other companies and that have focused nearly exclusively on driving performance, in favor of an effort to build the company’s brands.

In the pilot in Sweden, consumers who visited a food truck that was Knorr branded were given the opportunity to sample its latest flavor of soup. Those shoppers were then retargeted with a mobile ad the next time they launched the Aftonbladet Swedish newspaper app. The typical display ads that had been displayed within that app were often replaced with coupons that were designed to provide shoppers with a reminder of the campaign, and to underscore the idea that Knorr is a brand that is modern and that is keeping up with the things that people care about the most, right now.

At the moment, the company hasn’t revealed any intentions to expand the location based marketing program to other regions, such as the United Kingdom or the United States. However, Unilever has indicated that it will be moving its tests using iBeacons into major supermarkets, over the first half of this year.