Location Based Services –Marketing Tool, Moral Dilemma.

Written by Administrator | 20 January 2010

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Location Based Services The run down: Location Based Service (LBS) apps are used for information and entertainment accessed with mobile devices that utilize the geographical position of the device. For example Traffic for the iPhone is an application that finds where you are and then tells you the traffic conditions in your area. This new trend crosses into a moral dilemma. Privacy.

Like everything online (i.e. Google) the trend towards personalisation is upon us. LBS are a really a big leap in that direction and is just starting to pick up in strides. Even more so, the opportunity for it to be used as a marketing tool is huge – but is LBS really such a new concept? Lisa Bowman (1999) made a prediction that, "The control of GPS tracking information will be a significant public policy issue several years from now,”. That prediction is coming to fruition.

A few years ago i studied RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and LBS. From a marketing perspective, the idea was to be able to track customers from where they shopped, when the last time they came into your store to the amount they bought. All this would be registered through transmissions and stored into a database. Imagine all that information! That is a marketers dream, but a dream too soon - technology used in this way had major backlash. The issue then was a moral and ethical one that has plagued LBS since conception i.e. breach of privacy.

Let me get the main point out into the open – I am predicting; a great wave of Location Based Service Apps, I am predicting marketing dollars invested into this area because the LBS dream never died...it just had to go through a shift. I am predicting LBS to be a successful inclusion into the total integration of technology and marketing campaigns and there will be unprecedented information on customers. OK, so all that is pretty much a given and I’m no Nostradamus – however there is one more prediction. All this will happen in front of people’s eyes, in fact they will voluntarily adopt it and encourage it and won’t even know they have opened Pandora’s Box, but why?

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