What problems solves HoToKeN? For which country will this be most useful?
Consumers are bombarded with irrelevant or location-impractical promotions, which they are learning to ignore. Asia’s population, nearly one third of the world’s 7.5 billion people, is young, social, and aspirational. And they are avid consumers of promotions. In fact,
53% of the people in Asia, especially Millennials (across income levels), seek discounts and promotions on a regular basis. Current online “hot-promotions” presented to them, however, are often irrelevant with little or no consideration to time of day, consumer demographics and preferences, and consumer location. Clearly, Data Science and LBS will become requisite for proper Marketing Operations (MO) in this environment.
Merchants are beset with significant increases in the costs of
Mobile Marketing, a problem that increases as the larger social network platforms and messaging platforms exhibit oligopolistic behavior in markets without anti-monopoly protections. While large, well-established companies have the funds and capabilities to publish their own branded app, the cost of running an effective marketing campaign on established social media and messaging platforms are prohibitively expensive for small and medium-size merchants. As a result, these smaller merchants often choose to not market online.
In addition, these larger social network and messaging platforms offer limited tools for merchants to identify and target high propensity consumers at specific locations and during optimal times of the day. Even if some of these functions are available individually, most of the merchants do not have the technical capabilities to combine available functionalities into an effective tool. Even worse, mainstream platforms provide merchants with limited telemetry as to the effectiveness of such costly marketing campaigns, making it difficult for merchants to “tune” their marketing and promotional efforts. This results in an ineffective and expensive service which fails to address the needs of (thinly-capitalized) small to medium-scale retail businesses.
HotNow has solved several of these problems by integrating LBS into its platform, and creating strong statistical tools and methods to give merchants the information that they need to manage their businesses much more cost effectively.
