The Rise of Perceptive Design in Real-Time Marketing

Perceptive Design vs. Predictive Design

You have probably heard about Google Now, the app that sends you ‘the right information at just the right time […] before you even ask’. Based on weather forecasts and your general route to work, it can remind you to take an umbrella or show public transport options when it is time to go home. While Google calls this predictive design, Alistair highlighted that perceptive design is less about managing or failing to predict happenings, but more about addressing your needs in the exact moment, real-time. In that sense, predictive design (showing public transport options) is always a subsequent step of perceptive design (based on your location, time, day, weather, weekly routine, Gmail calendar etc.).

Perceptive Design in Mobile

The process of perceptive design is a permanent state of reinvention. One that starts with sensing variables such as time or location, then making meaning of this information, and finally being able to push out the most relevant advice to the user (before sensing again). In my personal view, sensing is the game changer here. New technologies, particularly mobile, have transformed the extent to what people are tractable. While advertisers targeted customers based on relatively static demographics and psychographics in the past, we are now connected 24/7 and there are new dimensions of data that can be collected. In the future, marketers will not target segments but individuals. Glenn Famy, also of Essence, emphasised seven technologies that can enhance the user experience in more perceptive ways:

1. Location
2. Time
3. Motion and orientation
4. User media
5. Battery API
6. Touch points
7. Link prefetching

New Opportunities in Wearables and other Technologies

While these seven technologies revolve around the use of smartphones, the scope of perceptive design goes beyond this. Google, for example, recently acquired Nest, a startup that produces digital thermostats for households. Nest can determine additional measures such as temperature or humidity, which may be coordinated with advertising messages for online customers. Another recent trend saw the rise of wearable technologies, particularly in the sports and health sector. The Nike Fuel band can sense heart rate and blood flow; other devices are able to measure fat-percentages or sugar-levels for diabetics. The number of new devices and techniques to sense customer-characteristics mean bigger sets of data that have to be interpreted and understood. It also means that marketers and companies will be able to target customers more directly. Surely, it will bring value and solutions, too, in medicine, for example. The big question, however, is to what extent customers are willing to give away their increasingly private data?

Privacy Concerns: Perceptive Advertising

Over the last couple of years, the age of perceptive design has already started. A significant amount of people use location-based apps such as Google Maps or Uber, and geo-tag their friends in Facebook or Instagram posts on a daily basis. Other apps such as Skype have full access to our mobiles’ cameras and microphone, but most consumers are not even aware of it. We are currently at a phase in which companies could already target consumers better using more perceptive design approaches, but hesitate to do so due to privacy concerns. This is especially applicable to advertising rather than apps that add value to the consumer’s everyday life. Perceptive data could also potentially become much more valuable when advertisers would be able to utilise those new bunches of data. In my eyes, it will not take long until the big corporates will desensibilise our feelings towards that data. I personally believe that perceptive advertising will come in stages, one sense after another. Once consumers significantly value a new sense-dimension in their everyday life (e.g. location-based services for the Nike Running app), they will be willing to receive advertising that is targeted through that sense. Kiss your privacy goodbye; perceptive design is coming. Deal with it.