Report • 09.04.2014
Data Acqusition with the help of an app
Product placement, advertising and outdated records are reviewed by crowdsourcing with the smartphone
Imagine the following not quite unrealistic scenario: Your company has purchased a certain placement, let us assume directly at the entrance of a retail chain, for a significant sum of money.
Now, these need to be checked, but there are hundreds of stores and you can only check a sample of those with your company's own field managers. Quickly you are faced with the dilemma that you cannot be sure if your product is truly at its agreed upon place in every store.
The principle of crowdsourcing
Now imagine, that there is a community of over 100,000 smartphone users in 8 different countries across Europe, who can take the verification off of your hands at a fraction of what field managers would cost you. The thing is, you do not have to imagine this community it already exists and is waiting for your tasks.
For more than 2 years the IT start up wer denkt was GmbH from Darmstadt, Germany has been offering this platform. It all started with various cases of navigation data jobs for TomTom, who the community helps until today to keep its map data up to date. Soon more and more interested firms joined the network and in the meantime the company's focus has shifted to the retail industry and its associated suppliers.
Applications: map data, retail or mystery shopping
The app provides a wide range of possibilities for companies. This way they companies can check their own products, observe the competition, check their advertising efforts and also conduct surveys, which the community happily completes. The newest application which has been added are mistery shopping tasks.
This way many POS and POI projects have been successfully created. Motorola verifies the introduction of its newest smartphones with AppJobber. Several press distributers, like DPV Worldwide GmbH have the availability and placement of different magazines and their displays checked. An illuminating advertisement manufacturer has jobbers reporting defect illuminating advertisement and uses AppJobber as an additional sales approach. A very interesting assignment for the community came from the company 3Sixty-TV GmbH, who had the Jobbers check if their in-store media in fast food restaurants work properly.
AppJobber can be used by business for POI's as well. The Deutsche Bahn uses AppJobber to check the condition of their rental cars and their corresponding stations. This venture was so successful that it has been rolled out to their bicycle fleet too.
The service the young german company offers seem to spark an interest with companies from the retail sector. This is how for example several contacts could be established at the Euroshop in Düsseldorf this year that have already led to concrete applications.
The benefits of using AppJobber for businesses is clear. The Jobbers with their smartphones' cameras and GPS can easily complete tasks on the spot and do this faster and more cost efficient than the companies own field personnel, which in turn makes it possible for firms to focus on more important and complex tasks.
As the CEO Dr. Robert Lokaiczyk confirmed in a conversation, the AppJobber provides an abundance of possibilities, especially in the area of POS where small and regional dispersed as well as time sensitive matters can be outsourced to a large community to gain additional benefits that are most valuable for your own business.
Source: wer denkt was GmbH
channels: POS marketing, app, smartphone, POS management, mystery shopping
