businesses: potentially self-defeating
I suppose there is a possibility that corporations could find difficulty in trying to use locative media successfully. Suppose that McDonalds for example decides to use bluetooth to advertise as obnoxiously as they undoubtedly would, and they point out all of their locations to show “convenience.” What the consumer might see on a map, however, is their neighborhood being overrun with McDonalds’s. For example, near my house, there is a McDonalds in a shopping center, and just across the freeway is a WalMart with another McDonalds embedded inside it. Overlay that map with a map of all the Burger Kings and then Wendy’s and Carls Jr. Then the consumer begins to feel overwhelmed and pushes away from fastfood burger places altogether.
They will probably be careful to avoid this in their marketing strategies, but at the same time, locative interventionists will able to spread these concerns to the people. It may even become possible to falsify corporate advertising or bring to light certain characteristics about a company that they don’t want known. “Avoid the McDonalds on the right; they’ve been having problems with health codes.” “Clothing sold here was made in sweatshops that use child labor: see map for more details, or read the findings by investigative reporters.”
As locative stuff spreads wider and more intricately, it will be interesting to see how business will need to change to keep up.
Even though this has not yet happened in bluetooth, I’ve noticed this phenomenon in my friend’s GPS system that she has in her Toyota Prius. She looks at it as a convenience, but when I saw it, I was appalled at all the “points of interest” that were clogging up the map.
I think I may have mentioned this in class, but one evening we were in Oakland looking for a Subway sandwich shop and according to the map there were a ton of them. Of course we couldn’t find any of them because some of them were in the BART stations and inside office buildings, or closed and their signs off.
For me, this supposed convenience of having these locations embedded in the map were frustrating. I made the proposal of driving around and just looking for a place the old fashioned way, but my friend who is quite dependent on her GPS by now though that was preposterous and archaic.
Comment by phyllis — February 19, 2008 @ 6:45 pm