Live healthier with the new Mission App from Whole Foods
For all you foodie app junkies out there, and you know who you are! … check out the new “Mission App” from Whole Foods.
Hats Off to Whole Foods … this app is a really strong example of both mobile application and peer-to-peer communication … and another reason that my iPhone looks so used and beaten up. From a marketing point of view, apps like this one further elevate and extend the Whole Foods brand … certainly this app is a perfect manifestation of the Whole Foods mission.
The Mission App allows users to earn badges for taking steps toward various goals. There are more than 70 “missions” for you to choose from. Within each is a checklist of foods to eat, things to do, even movies to watch. All designed to educate and push you out of whatever rut you’re stuck in. When you successfully complete all of the requirements within a category you earn a badge. You can share your badges with friends via twitter, facebook or email.
Personally, I’m not going for any badges. For me, the usefulness is the Tips section … it offers more than 300 tips across nine subject matters: Cooking, Fresh & Frugal, Green Living, In the Store, Nutrition, Storage, Time Savers, Your Wellness and a kind of strange group called Worth a Try. I’ve found many of the tips to be helpful, especially those in Cooking and Storage.
Fun, succinct and social. Oh, and free! Available for iPad, iPhone and iPod.
Time to rethink your passwords
Make the hackers work a little harder…turn your eight character passwords into 12 characters or more. With current technologies eight character passwords can be defeated in two hours, but it will take over 17 years to get past 12 characters. Security experts also advise you to not use real words, and to use full sentences. More great tips in this article.
Marketers…this is a good thing to know if you’re updating your mobile site and websites, and you’re currently requiring a password for login. Some sites aren’t friendly to long passwords. Another good idea is to proactively make your customers aware of this. Get a message out to them, prompt them to update their password, and post password best-practices on your login screen.
The Lay’s® Locavore Alert … a real potato farm could be coming to your town!
High noon at the Lay's event in Chicago
Come out from behind the two-way mirror
That coupon you just downloaded could be a window into your world. When you viewed it online, the barcode on it was dynamically generated with what could be very personal information about you. When you take it into the store to redeem it, the retailer could instantly know the search words you used, where you got the coupon, where you live, and a host of other details that can help them target you better.
16 years after the first cookie was planted on a computer, the business of capturing and profiting from online behavioral data has exploded, and grown to include mobile user data. There’s an attitude amongst us marketers that lack of privacy is the trade-off that consumers make for their access to content on the internet and on mobile phones….and that we have every right to spy if it means we can make faster and more relevant offers to specific individuals.
But please, let’s regulate ourselves before the regulators step in. We’re intrigued by a company called Media6Degrees Inc., who is pushing the envelope. The folks at Media6Degrees envision the day when financial institutions can make judgments about you by who you associate with online. According to this Wall Street Journal article, “The idea is that the creditworthy tend to hang out with the creditworthy, and deadbeats with deadbeats.”
How many times do we need to learn…what the consumer doesn’t know can hurt you. Protect your brand and think twice about how you’re using this data. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
Looking for the elusive Canola plant
There was a recent report on genetically-modified Canola from NPR. Typical NPR stuff with one exception—the reporter talked about the Canola plant. Plant as in organic item that grows in the ground, not a building that processes raw materials to produce Canola Oil. Canola oil comes from the rapeseed plant. By the way, the word rape comes from a Latin word meaning turnip. The word Canola is an acronym standing for Canadian Oil, Low Acidity. It was a smart branding decision as no one is going to purchase a product with the word “rape” in it. Come on NPR, do your homework.
How to succeed with social media marketing
Mark Zuckerburg, then a student at Harvard, created an online social network where college students could congregate and share their life experiences from the past and as its happening. Opening enrollment beyond the campus and into the neighborhoods, Facebook is rapidly nearing 500 million members worldwide. Does social media, with its origins in the collegiate environment, make it a viable medium for higher education institutions to engage with prospective students for enrollment purposes?
