Live Needs Marketing

You know customer loyalty has a huge payoff. The best way to build this is by understanding their needs. Yes, this is obvious but the world has changed. Twitter arrived and the issue of real time search has become a reality.

This takes the idea of implied and explicit needs to a new level and introduced the idea of Live Needs Marketing.

What is Live Needs Marketing ?

Twitter recently posted on tcuheir blog that they will be making a location services available in their API code. This will probably mean little technically to most people but the implications are huge for marketing and customer loyalty.

Update: location now happened

Twitter currently offers a real time search platform. So let’s say you want to see if people are talking about Britney Spears. All you do is use twitter search and out pops the result of who is discussing what about her latest antics in the present.

If you did the same search on Google you would get a historical based search result. Your Google home page would show a list stories and information that Google has gathered in their many data sheds around the world.

Whilst both Google and Twitter operate off an internet platform, twitter is available as an application on smart phones and can be accessed lived. And this is where the real dynamics of marketing are starting to change.

A projection chart on The Business Insider shows that the sales of smart phone will pass the sales of PC’s by 2011. This just adds weight to how marketers will need to adapt in the future to create customer loyalty.

Technology comes and goes but the principle is established

Let’s go back to Twitter opening up their API code to location services. I am technically simplifying this explanation as there are technical and privacy issues that need to be addressed (which they will be in the near future).

Also Twitter may very well go under tomorrow so let’s not get too caught up in the technology side of this explanation. The principle is far more important than Twitter here.

By opening up its API code Twitter will now make it possible to pin point where I tweet. If I choose to open up the location service from my twitter settings anyone in that region will able to clue in on what I have just tweeted. This can be regionalised down to a neighbourhood level.

Some Examples …

Let’s say I fly down to Cape Town from Johannesburg and as my flight lands (and I have disembarked) I tweet “what is the best car rental price for this hour?”

Any rental companies awake enough can get my business by monitoring the tweets and giving me an option within a minute. customer loyalty built .

Let’s take this one step further.  As I am driving to my meeting I realise if forgot the power cable for the special projector I brought for the presentation (this really did happen to me). I need one urgently. I tweet – someone responds. Problem solved. Sale made.

How far can we go …

With the Twitter location services you will be able to monitor Tweets at a town or neighbourhood level. You can talk about the neighbourhood crime stats with neighbours you have never met, tell strangers about traffic problems as you encounter them or even let the local hospital that you’re bringing your kid into the emergency room with a cut forehead (yes, that happened to).

Live needs marketing is in the very near future and it will not be driven by your company, brands or products and services.

Live needs marketing will be driven by how our customer’s behaviour evolves over time.

So whether you are in an industrial, business or a retail environment, it will be relevant to you as a marketer.  How, I am not sure. But I do know that your industrial buyer also goes to MacDonald’s and may even be on Twitter. They are also a consumer and they will bring that experience into their business.