Loyalty programmes have been given a boost by location-based services and social media. Companies like Groupon can use twitter and the like to pump out masses of offers to huge groups, taking advantage of ridiculously fast scaling to become HUGE. Location-based applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and the rest have created a bridge between peoples movement, their custom and the chance to personalise services, deals and offers based on their habits and a GPS signal. Real-time, customised retailing is not that far away (shudder).
This is all great if a) you have a smartphone, b) you feel it’s worth it letting people know where you are 24/7 and c), all you do is shop.
Speeding up understanding of social and environmental issues is going to be pretty hard if all the good info is imprisoned in tables. The three trends of data being more open, everything being more visual and life being on-demand/always-on should mean that numbers are no longer just for the analysts and ratings agencies.
How to realign behaviour to tackle big challenges in a world that is on the edge of a nervous breakdown?
In an age of fluid information flows and ridiculous interconnectivity, I’m on the look out for neat, smart things that can have a big impact, fast, taking the sustainability message out into the wild and engaging with the seemingly unreachable.
Collaborative consumption has a huge role to play in shifting attitudes to owning more ‘stuff’ and showing up those who talk about sustainable consumption and shifting more units in the same breath.
Corporate efforts so far have mainly dealt with work around reducing waste, reducing resource use in production, raising labour standards, promoting certification standards and adding socioeconomic benefits to products and services. All good but, at its heart sustainable consumption must mean buy/use less stuff.
Before the internet went social and we still lived in an age of push, companies that wanted to engage with big issues through their CR programme would pump out mega treatises on their approach to dealing with their social, economic and environmental issues.
