I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with beacons and geofences as we ramp up our proximity offerings at ShopAdvisor. There are some very cool things being done by companies such as Skyhook, Urban Airship, and Gimbal. Other companies such as Swirl and Mobiquity are also using micro-location with beacons to record interesting foot traffic patterns in malls and retail stores. Well established players like ShopKick are using beacons to earn in-store rewards, and Starbucks, Apple Stores, and Macy’s have all jumped on the micro-location/beacon bandwagon.
What I’ve discovered with all my research and talking with many of these companies, is that most are still defaulting to simply sending a push notification when a beacon is sighted or a geofenced region is entered. I don’t think this is the intention or the vision of these companies, in fact, many have elaborate scenarios documented on their websites. I think the problem here is with the retailers. I don’t think it is because their vision is short-sighted, more likely, it’s just extremely limited. This certainly isn’t a criticism of retailers, as I know many are quite interested in beacons and micro-location. I think the closed “network” of beacons is what has made truly interesting campaigns difficult, if not impossible.
