Moving Sales With Trajectory-Based Mobile Advertising

MIT Sloan Management Review, July 19, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

What a difference a decade can make. In June 2007, Apple released the iPhone; now, mobile internet usage outstrips desktop usage. In the United States, consumers spend more time on mobile apps than watching television, and m-commerce is rapidly approaching $100 billion annually.

Given the fast rise of mobile, it’s no surprise that marketers are well aware of it as a sales channel. But mobile isn’t just a new channel for reaching consumers with the same old offers. It provides marketers with valuable new sources of information about consumers, and it enables them to deliver new kinds of offers.

Anindya Ghose, Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is one of the pioneering explorers of the intersection of mobile and marketing. In his new book, Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy (MIT Press, 2017), he collects his findings and weaves them together into a set of nine forces that marketers can wield to drive sales via mobile technologies.

One of the forces that Ghose explores is trajectory. “In the online world, it took us only a few years to get accustomed to, and often even embrace, the idea that firms — including e-commerce firms, search engines, and website publishers — can track our browsing behavior and predict our next steps,” he explains. “A similar revolution is about to hit us off-line. The springboard for this revolutionary leap is the individual’s trajectory. An individual’s trajectory is the physical and behavioral trace of his or her off-line movements.”

Mobile devices allow marketers to track a consumer’s walking pattern and predict where he or she will go next. Moreover, they can create and deliver offers based on that trajectory. In the following excerpt, Ghose describes what he and his colleagues learned when they used trajectory-based advertising in one of Asia’s largest shopping malls. Read the excerpt here.