Presumption and Preemption: New Apps Tie Deals To Anticipated, Not Past, Behavior

Knowing what someone is going to buy before they do so is the holy grail of marketers. It enables more efficient use of advertising, promotion and public relations expenditures, reduces uncertainty in inventory purchases and takes a lot of risk out of investment. There are now programs designed to do that on-line.

Sarah Kessler enlightens in Mashable:

"When the latest version of Foursquare launched earlier this month, the brunt of the overhaul was a new recommendation engine called “explore.” The feature provides recommendations to people based on where they’ve been, the places their friends go, places they’ve been to with friends, and what time it is.

Instead of providing information for users about the places where they and their friends already are — as the rest of the app is designed to do — it gives them information about where they might go.

Foursquare, an early pioneer of location-based check-in games, isn’t the first to realize that the potential of checking in “now” is limited without a “later” to accompany it. Startups have started to innovate past the present-tense checkin, instead allowing their users to check in to what they are about to do.

“When you’re a Foursquare user, you’re already seated at that cafe, you’ve already ordered your latte, and that’s when you check in and find that there’s a special across the street,” explains Ditto founder Jyri Engestrom. “What are your chances of actually getting up and walking across the street to that special? pretty low.”

Ditto, which launched in early March, is somewhat of a response to Foursquare. It allows users to broadcast what they are going to do (eat out, listen to music, work, see a movie) to friends, who can then recommend places to do such things or offer to join. It combines these recommendations from people who users already trust with an option to accept recommendations from strangers nearby.

The focus on the future is a matter of both usefulness and revenue, explains Engestrom, who previously founded Google-acquired microblogging platform Jaiku.

“If you think about things like our Google search, that’s what makes search advertising so lucrative, right? Because it’s about contacting people at that moment when they’re making a decision about something that they’re going to purchase or an activity that they’re going to do,” he says.

With the rise of premptive check-in services, whether offering deals or simple Google search ads, businesses have a way to hit this decision point with a social emphasis.

Startup Crowdbeacon, for instance, at some point plans to charge small businesses to answer inquiries made on its Q&A location-based platform. Users of the app throw out questions about where they are, such as, “does anybody know where to get a good burger?” These questions are then pushed out to other users in the area as well as small businesses.

Right now about 100 businesses in the New York area are signed up to respond to those types of inquiries with something like “Great burger is here, and we’re running a deal.” Eventually, if all goes as founder Robert Boyle plans, they’ll pay to respond.

“If I know where you are and you tell me what you are looking for, and I can help you, that’s valuable to you as a service,” Boyle explains. “But if you tell me where you are and I can tell the people that have what you are looking for nearby, then that’s really valuable to them.”

New York-based social startup ImUp4 plans to apply a somewhat similar revenue model to an app that allows users to premptively check in to activities. Users post messages like, “I’m up for drinks tonight” within their group of friends with hopes of gaining company. A promising option for monetization, says co-founder Suraj Patel, are Groupon-like deals targeted at groups of friends that have already said they intend to do something relevant. For instance, a bar might offer a drink special if that person who was up for drinks can find three friends who are also up for it.

“With Groupon, deals come at you,” Patel says. “Most of the time they’re irrelevant and you delete them. But if you say you’re up for drinks, you’re asking for a drink deal, and it’s relevant.”