Manufacturing Moments and Marketing Serendipity: Welcome to the New Frontier

This is a repost of an article I wrote for Forbes in May on the idea of manufactured serendipity and marketing. ________________________________________________________
The idea of manufactured serendipity is not new within the digital world. Whether it’s finding out when friends and other interesting people are nearby or what they recommended in your current location, our apps have given us plenty of moments of discovery. You know when you “discover" that really cool coffee shop thanks to Foursquare or meet up with a friend you didn’t expect to see thanks to Glancee, Highlight, Sonar and Banjo or newer entries like quadstreaker and the updated Google Maps.

While these apps are useful, they are lacking in the most powerful element: a specific action that benefits you, the user. This gap has led to an interesting and emerging trend from marketers – combining manufactured serendipity with timeliness. And, what’s emerging is a new idea: The marketplace of moments.

The marketplace of moments is the creation of time-limited offers and deals via mobile that depend on your being in the right place, at the right time and taking the necessary action. A step beyond Foursquare deals, these marketplace moments place a premium of time and combine that with the discovery element of manufactured serendipity. Here are some examples:

• Guatemalan sneaker store, Meat Packer’s Hijack added a time-sensitive discount feature to its existing app to steal customers from rival stores. Using GPS technology to track when a customer entered the rival store, the app pushed a notification to the customer offering a time-sensitive discount at Meat Peak. The discount started at 99% and decreased to 1% with each second that passed causing customers to rush to Meat Pack to get the best deal. In one week alone, Meat Pack took 600 customers from its competitors. 
• Emart’s “Sunny Sale” in South Korea used a three-dimensional QR code that was placed across Seoul and could only be scanned during 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. daily, due to the sunlight casting a shadow to complete the QR code. Anybody who scanned the code was given a special discount code of 25% off that could be redeemed in store or through their mobile e-commerce site. Emart saw an enormous increase in sales during the promotion. 
• BiteHunter in the United States is a niche daily deal aggregator site that uses a real-time location based on an iPhone mobile app. The app sets your location automatically and presents you with offers. Search results are displayed in a convenient map format. Additionally, the site offers a one-click payment option, restaurant contact information and reviews. 

Each of these apps creates a sense of urgency at a point of relevancy. But it’s clearly only the beginning. There is a great opportunity to expand the marketplace of moments.

For example, what happens if you take this marketplace of moments a step further and pair with it predictive apps that are based on emotion? Let’s say you use Happstr (a mobile app that lets users mark geographical locations where they’re feeling happy.) When you walk past one of these happy places, a restaurant where you had a great first date for example, and you are served a discount that you have to use within the next hour.

Suddenly, you’ve combined an emotional memory with a marketplace moment. The relevance of such an action is sure to increase positive feelings and potentially boost loyalty for your product or service. There are many powerful opportunities that have yet to be explored combining emotion, timeliness and technology. It’s just up to marketers to act.

ParkShark: A practical app for city drivers

It seems like every day tons of new apps show up. Some are fun. Some are cool, but very few offer a tangible, practical benefit. ParkShark is one of the few.

I've lived in a number of cities where finding a parking spot is next to impossible. Driving into downtown Boston or really anywhere in Boston/Cambridge and finding a parking space is one of the most frustrating experiences a person can have. Washington D.C. was hardly better. I remember one weekend day during the winter I needed to go into my office in downtown D.C. and naively decided to drive. After two hours of circling the Farragut Square and Logan Circle areas looking for any parking spot, I gave up and drove home. Even now, in Minneapolis, finding a parking spot can be a challenge.

What I like about ParkShark is that it attempts to offer a solution. According to Creativity-Online's write-up, "independent software developers Peter Cetinski and Dimitriy Frenkel hope to temper your road rage—and help the environment too, with ParkShark, an app that promises to land you a parking spot, as soon as you need it. And it works anywhere in the world, not just Manhattan." The purpose of this app is to "optimize the use of limited parking resources, reduce pollution, reduce congestion and eliminate the frustration that comes with searching for a parking space." I'm not sure about anyone else, but that sounds like a dream come true to me.

Currently, ParkShark is only available for the iPhone. However, there are plans to develop Android and Blackberry versions.