Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Commerce used to be personal. Customers would talk to a retailer before being recommended a product or service. Then mass production came along. Standardization allowed for scale while effectively killing personality. That was yesterday. Today’s brands are returning to personalization, but making it possible on a mass scale.

At AdAge IDEA Conference, Tim Westergren asked conference attendees whether or not they use Pandora. The entire room raised their hands. Tim is the founder of Pandora, an online music service that entertains millions. He’s not about forcing the Top 20 on you; he's about custom tailoring radio for your specific needs. Pandora is able to learn and evolve in order to provide each listener with varying experiences. Tim told us about one older man who came to a town-hall meetup thinking Pandora was for listening to the 'US Navy Marching Band.' He might not had known that Pandora wasn't made specifically for him.

Even big brands can learn to act small. Coca-Cola VP of VEB Group Mary-Ann Summers presented on the 'art of emerging.' Her group, Venturing and Emerging Brands, can be considered Coca-Cola trendspotting and incubation lab, a group built for scaling good ideas. The company has moved on from its core soft drink product to discover and invest in tomorrow's billion dollar brands. While plenty of Coca-Cola's products play in the middle of the distribution curve, VEB lives on the left. This means that they develop things that not everybody will like. This is critical for global success. Fermented soda Krushka & Bochka KVASS is bigger in Russia than Coke itself.

4food, a restaurant we covered in June, has successfully designed a business fueled by social interactivity and personalization. After telling the brand's story, founder Adam Kidron explained that there are 96 billion ways to make a 'whole burger.' When ordering, customers are asked to make their own burger from a number of ingredients. Because it is so open-ended, the ordering process becomes an act of personal expression and creativity. Your burger says something about you. It's only natural that people should share and "politicize" their creations. If people sell their recipe, they are paid with 4food credits. Popular combinations are presented on a real-time and dynamic menu, updated according to supply and demand. Adam and his partner have embraced social behavior to crowdsource their menu, automate R&D, and even save themselves money on marketing. Personalization means working smarter, not harder.

1. Travelocity Gnome Now Roaming on Foursquare http://j.mp/dcdTy5

2. What The Phone in Your Pocket Will Do For You Someday http://j.mp/9riSj9

3. Mobile Phones Enable New Interactive Experiences with Print http://j.mp/9y6SXi

4. Tweet and Eat: 4Food to Serve Up Futuristic Dining Experience in NYC http://j.mp/a60fQV

5. Layer of the week: Shop till you drop in the new Hostage virtual shopping layer http://j.mp/cbd1ia

6. Stanford Students Reveal Intimate Connection With Mobile Phones http://j.mp/bF07RG

7. You Are What You Carry: Photo Series Shows the Gadgets in Our Bags http://j.mp/bqyWCn

8. Nokia To Release Bicycle-Powered Phone Charger http://j.mp/bqCDp9

9. The New York Times Enters Mobile Location Game With The Scoop http://j.mp/99krm2

10. MasterCard, INSIDE Contactless & CPI Card Group Team For “PayPass” Mobile Payments http://j.mp/bsT8MO

Tweetworthy is a weekly roundup of the most shared tweets from @MobileBehavior. You can follow us on Twitter here.

4Food is a new restaurant opening in Midtown Manhattan that could be from the future. In addition to serving a Jetson-inspired menu, it builds Internet culture into its core experience, positioning itself as "an Apple store meets Chipotle."

Social networking and collaboration will play roles, as a 240 square foot display built into a wall will show both Foursquare check-ins to the location as well as Twitter updates. Customers will be encouraged to share the customized burgers they make and can even get 25-cent credits for every burger sold based on their choice of ingredients.

And these aren't any ordinary burgers, they are scooped out and filled with veggies. 4Food's mission is to make fast food healthy and eco-friendly. According to their site:

• We upgrade food that people already eat-burgers, nuggets, fries, salads and teas - transforming them into new menu items that are convenient, and almost infinitely customizable to our guests' lifestyles and cultural preferences. Our food is measurably healthier than existing products.
• Dynamic Menu Boards reduce waste and enable us to feature seasonal and occasional products.
• Advanced, web-based technologies allow us to make personalized recommendations that meet our guest's nutrition and lifestyle goals.
• Fresh, local produce is transformed into our menu offerings in the Community Kitchen Commissary-a vocational training center.
• We build with natural construction materials that are abundant and regenerative.

Restaurants want customers to share with their social graph, to lure people in "like the scent out of a bakery window," and we suspect that is the sort of place that we suspect people will love to talk about online. The physical space is designed to encourage this through place-based social media, i.e. digital screens in venues (see: Locamoda).  We'd hope there is free Wi-Fi. And did we mention they take your order via iPad?

[via eater]