Interactive
The Online Impact at the Grocery Store
Cereal Scan iPhone app
This type of mobile usage is just starting to catch fire. I’ve been loading apps for scanning as soon as they were available. Red Laser crashed my iPhone on its inaugural day; but updates have shown continual improvement. Good Guides also has a scanner app, telling you not only nutritional information, but company’s social and sustainability records as well. Food Scanner is ok, it keeps a food diary for you if you want it to, but I’ve found that its database isn’t populated with most of the stuff that I eat. I do track my food intake, though, through Lose It. But that’s another story.
A recent Deloitte study (conducted in March, 2010 and just released last week) indicates that 7% of those surveyed are using mobile apps at the grocery store. Why? To compare prices, redeem coupons, find discounts, read product reviews and of course, get nutritional information either through an app or by linking directly to a company/product website.
I’m forever fascinated by the differences in grocery shopping habits between men and women. Mobile usage for food shopping is no different. Overwhelmingly, men use mobile apps to retrieve discounts (53% vs. 38%) and compare prices (59% vs. 49%).
Women use mobile apps most to obtain nutritional information (36% vs. 18).
Armed with information, 23% of those surveyed said that they have bought a food item because of something read on line; and 22% said that they’ve “not purchased a food product as a result of something read online.”
Pat Conroy from Deloitte stated, “Consumers realize their shopping choices have expanded, giving them the ability to be more selective about their purchases based on a variety of criteria. The question companies are asking now is, ‘Will this more critical eye towards purchasing be the new norm or just a passing result of the economic downturn?’”.
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Snow Leopard: Big Deal?
Yes. big deal. Although Apple’s 10.5 is now 10.6, don’t let that incremental number suggest an incremental tweak.
Characteristic to its name, Snow Leopard leaps OS X into a speedier, most reliable, space-crunching operating system. This 64-bit system is built to be highly efficient in the use of memory – multiple applications in use simultaneously will function much cleaner and far faster than any other operating system. That’s not a tweak – that’s a big claim. For business users, OS X now integrates with corporate systems using Microsoft Exchange. Reviews abound on the new features, including a great write-up from Engadget. They all suggest Leopard users upgrade, and urge Tiger users to leap – guess that includes me.
Facebook Keeping Face
While the social media world has been fixated with Twitter – naysayers, advocates, rule setters, collectors, faux pas – Facebook has been not so quietly keeping pace in their own growth. The last time we took a serious look at Facebook, we reported the “Granny syndrome” as the fastest growing segment. Well there’s news to report since then.
On today’s MENG (Marketing Executive Networking Group) webinar, Richard Krueger, the facilitator of FACEBOOK STRATEGY FOR BUSINESS AND BRANDS, provided some pretty staggering statistics. And he should know. He has devoted the past year and a half to studying this online social network for writing a book on its marketing applications.
