Lack of insight into consumers’ motivations for emerging digital behaviors—and their offline siblings—can be the root cause for slow adoption of or a plain lack of ingenuity in marketing innovations. Rectifying the often ill-defined nature of strategies for new revenue generation and brand building should begin with ethnographic research into consumer attitudes and with trends analysis that reveals the hidden potential of cultural fringe activities moving towards the mainstream.

Speaking of moving into the mainstream, consumers participate in, have in effect created the trend of cartocracy, and they've done this due to several motivations, seven of which I submit for your consideration:

1. Discovery (of everything from biking trails to friends’ whereabouts), particularly meaningful to locasumers or transumers (consumers in transit) navigating new territory
2. Social advantage or cultural capital: being in-the-know about one’s neighborhood or a tourist destination (Intercontinental Hotels dramatically boosted its business with the single insight that its best patrons wanted insider skinny on the city they were visiting)
3. The strange allure of the Fourth Place (home + work + coffeehouse +“find” or time-sensitive hot spot that has cyber proof of its importance)
4. Flaneur-like spontaneity: using maps to go a different way to work, to encounter new places, people, things
5. Political change, citizen empowerment, issue awareness: maps speak to the visual processing part of our brains, which can grasp complicated messages without as much effort as reading requires
6. The construction and archiving of personal place-based memory; on Flickr in September 2008, 2.9 million things were geotagged. Camera- and GPS-enabled phones are the enabling technologies but data storage is a driver as well, in our new tera (terabyte) era.
7. Remote-controlled convenience, as provided by home-focused applications like Apple’s iControl

 

Cartocracy might be the biggest macrotrend you've never heard of. But your consumers can help you, well, navigate this new phenomenon.

 

Tagged as: geo web, trends

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