Quick Read: Marketers have always tried to dial up and capitalise on their consumers’ active interest and consideration levels. Now what if they could also leverage the lack of it?
Let’s take boredom.
A common human emotion, boredom often makes us to instinctively reach out to our mobile phones.
With our attention spans thrown into a state of suspended animation, it is natural that we see ourselves seeking solace in the infinite scrolls of updates, tweets, videos, pics etc.
In fact there is research to prove that our boredom levels can be inferred from – surprise surprise – our mobile phone usage alone!
By leveraging features related to our mobile phone usage like recency of communication, usage intensity, time of day and demographics – the research has successfully built a machine learning model that can infer our state of boredom with an 83% accuracy!!
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Interestingly, results from this research also suggest that people are more likely to engage with ‘recommended content’ when they are bored than when they are not.
Why?
Presumably because our ‘conscious choice’ takes a back seat when we are bored making us open to nibbling at a bit of whatever gets thrown our way.
Now these findings could have huge impact on targeting possibilities for marketers.
What if we could target not just by conventional cuts like demo, psychographics, affinities etc, but also by temporal mental states like say being bored, being excited, feeling low, feeling on top of the world etc?
Not too unrealistic a prospect. Is it?
But when that happens, we are looking at dramatic implications for brands from across a range of industries – be it for media platforms marketing content, or for e-commerce players seeking to deploy real time pricing interventions etc.
Now that’s interesting.
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Riffs on technology, marketing & culture 
Very interesting!