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How a Swedish soup experiment points to a better use of iBeacons

A Swedish marketing experiment involving soup could show the optimal way to employ iBeacons: “physical retargeting.”

Glimr, a mobile data management startup that frequently works with publishers, recently launched an iBeacon-based project involving soup for Sweden’s largest newspaper, Aftonbladet.

“All the use cases we’ve seen so far [for iBeacons] use a push approach,” Glimr CEO and cofounder Robert Hedberg pointed out to VentureBeat.

An example: pushing a discount coupon for a video game to your smartphone, when an iBeacon in a physical store flags that you’re standing there in the game section. Instead of that approach, he said, “we switched it around,” creating what the project collaborators call “physical retargeting.”

In November, a Knorr food truck in chilly Stockholm offered free warm samples of the brand’s tomato and Thai soups. Visitors could eat it on the spot or go home with samples. It set up iBeacons on the truck, and several people handing out samples were equipped with battery-powered iBeacons in their pockets.

Visitors to the truck who had the popular Aftonbladet app preinstalled were registered by the iBeacons as having been there. iBeacons, the Apple-backed implementation of beacon technology, are small devices that repeatedly transmit a unique location identifier via Bluetooth. A mobile app in a customer’s smartphone will note the ID, and transmit it back to a publisher or advertiser via Wi-Fi or cellular data. This indicates that the user is standing, say, at the Knorr truck.

As Hedberg noted, the usual iBeacon scenario is that the publisher or advertiser then immediately sends a location-specific ad, coupon, or other marketing communication to the user in the store. The idea is that you’re more likely to buy that new game — or soup — right then. But Europeans often have a more patient view of human interaction. Instead of immediately pushing a coupon for Knorr soup to the user, the Glimr approach was to wait: as in, wait until the next time the user opens the Aftonbladet app. It could be that evening, or days or weeks later. Then, on the first screen of the app, the user sees a discount coupon to buy Knorr soup at any Stockholm grocery store.

“The difference [from other iBeacon use cases] is that we’re using them to build up an offline profile,” Hedberg told us. That profile now shows that “these people have visited my store,” he said — or, in this case, my soup truck.