As summer is roaring, what better than discovering how solutions like NextUser’s could be used a bit differently with innovative research? Tech and digital landscapes are evolving rapidly. Plus, the lines of communication are expanding beyond the confines of human interactions. While the world is driven by environmental and social stakes, a group of people had a groundbreaking idea. They were the first to talk about the interspecies Internet. It is set to revolutionize our interactions with the world around us. We’ll dive deeper into this concept in order to understand how it could revolutionize the analysis of consumers’ behaviors, and enhance marketing strategies.
The dawn of the interspecies Internet:
The project interspecies Internet was conceived by Peter Gabriel, who, along with a team of experts including Internet protocol co-inventor Vint Cerf, cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss, and IoT pioneer Neil Gershenfeld, observed the communication abilities of bonobos and became inspired to expand these interactions. To test this idea, the team developed an underwater touchpad, dubbed the D-Pad, for dolphins. They also experimented with FaceTime to interact with chimpanzees. It all started with a “Wow, wait a minute” when Peter realized how divine was the sense of bonobo’s musical rhythm. This project aims to facilitate communication among intelligent animals and between animals and humans. To do so, it uses cutting-edge data analysis and technology tools. The prospect of this digital frontier doesn’t just redefine our understanding of interspecies relationships. In fact, it presents an unparalleled opportunity for businesses like ours to push the boundaries of marketing innovation. Communicating and doing tasks humans do is commom in the animal world. Studying how to link it to us, and how to interpret the animals’ different ways of living is a way to reduce the gap between humans and animals.
Ted Talk “The interspecies Internet? An idea in progress…” – 2013
Harnessing the interspecies Internet for NextUser:
For NextUser, the interspecies Internet represents an opportunity for groundbreaking innovation. Currently, we leverage AI-powered insights to enrich user data and better understand human customer behavior and preferences. These same tools could be utilized to analyze the communication patterns of various animal species.
As the interspecies Internet evolves, businesses could capitalize on understanding the preferences, behaviors, and needs of animals. This innovation could revolutionize industries such as pet care, wildlife conservation, and entertainment by informing the creation of better products, more engaging content, and superior experiences for both animals and their human caregivers. Imagine the impact of tailoring marketing campaigns based on the preferences of a specific animal species or promoting conservation efforts using real-time data from observed interspecies communication. The advent of the interspecies Internet has the potential to extend the reach of our marketing strategies into the vast and largely untapped demographic of the animal kingdom.
Enhancing NextUser’s offering with interspecies Internet:
The integration of the Interspecies Internet could add a new layer of complexity to our solutions’ existing features. NextUser’s AI-driven services, currently used to enrich human user data, could be expanded to include data from animal communication. This could yield deeper insights into interspecies interactions and inform strategies to promote positive engagements between humans and animals.
Moreover, real-time personalization and 360-degree user profiles, currently designed for human users, could be adapted to include animals, thereby extending the reach of NextUser’s services. And the omnichannel journey, which currently integrates multiple human-focused platforms such as web, mobile app, email, SMS, and push notifications, could potentially incorporate platforms designed specifically for interspecies interaction. It seems like something hardly reachable, as animals are not consumers. Yet, this could be an opportunity to retain even more the attention of animal owners (globally, 57% of households own a pet), carers, and protectors who attach great importance to taking care of animals in their own way.
Imagine…with a potential case study
At NextUser, we already rely on AI and +300 variables to create the most accurate user profiles, thus being able to orchestrate hyper-personalized marketing campaigns. But how could it be different if we leveraged the power of interspecies Internet? Let’s dive deeper into an imaginary case for a pet care brand.
PetCare Co. (yes, we went all in with imagination) decides to leverage NextUser’s capabilities to boost sales and enhance customer engagement. Despite its strong presence in the market, PetCare Co. has begun noticing a plateau in its sales growth. The company is searching for new, innovative ways to connect with its target demographic — pet owners — and provide products that catered directly to their pets’ needs. They realize that by better understanding the animals themselves, they can revolutionize their offerings and provide an unprecedented level of service.
To address this challenge, NextUser would implement several strategies linking both their solutions and interspecies Internet data. The integration of NextUser’s capabilities with the interspecies Internet would primarily focus on profiling, understanding, and personalizing for the animals themselves. Here’s how the process might be adapted:
- Animal data import: The initial stage involves importing existing data about the animal from various sources. This might include species, breed, age, health records, and any other relevant information. Information gathered through the interspecies Internet about specific behaviors, preferences, or communication patterns could be crucial inputs at this stage.
- Animal identification through interspecies Internet interaction: With the interspecies Internet, each interaction made by the animal could be tracked using identifiers such as unique physical attributes, location-based data, or specific behaviors. The technology used for interaction (e.g., touchpad for dolphins, vocal recognition for birds) could provide this identification.
- In-memory interaction steps and responses: The system would store and analyze the responses of the animal to various interaction steps. By remembering the steps and responses, the system could better understand the animal’s behavior, preferences, and communication patterns, thus creating a more detailed and accurate profile over time.
NextUser’s solution set up for Nestlé Purina. Enhanced with the interspecies Internet, this solution would be highly precise and accurate
- Passive animal interaction analysis: In addition to active interactions, passive behaviors or preferences displayed by the animal during these interaction periods could provide valuable insights. These could include preferences for certain interaction types or patterns, specific behavioral traits, or any other observable behavior that could be indicative of the animal’s state or needs.
- Individual behavioral profiles: Utilize the behavioral data collected to create individual profiles for each animal. By understanding an animal’s unique behaviors and communication patterns, interactions can be personalized to best suit their preferences and needs.
- Predictive analysis: Use machine learning algorithms to predict future behaviors or needs based on past data. This allows for proactive adjustments to interaction strategies and tools, ensuring they remain relevant and effective for each individual animal.
- Adaptive interaction tools: Design and adapt tools for interacting with the interspecies Internet based on each animal’s profile. This could involve adjusting the interface, prompts, or response options of a device to align with an animal’s natural behaviors and communication methods.
- Tailored enrichment activities: Based on each animal’s unique profile, tailor enrichment activities that can be delivered via the interspecies Internet. For instance, an animal that shows a preference for certain sounds or visual cues might receive personalized content that incorporates these elements.
- Real-time adjustments: Implement real-time adjustments to interactions based on immediate behavioral feedback from the animals. This allows for a highly responsive system that can quickly adapt to an animal’s changing behaviors or needs.
- Species-specific interaction strategies: Develop interaction strategies tailored to the known preferences and behaviors of different species. While individual personalization is important, acknowledging the general tendencies of a species can provide a solid foundation for these personalized interactions.
Going further with a real NextUser’s case study
In 2016, NextUser helped Nestlé facing several challenges. The brand wanted to aggregate user data, personalize the content for each user and target across digital touch points to reduce the bounce rate, boost the average time of a session duration and track the maximum amount of data available. The initial scope defined by the Purina team was to focus the initiatives around data collection and website personalization to prove a significant impact on the engagement metrics. To help the brand, we created the following four solutions:
- Connection: We introduced users into a tailored online experience by displaying 2 localized banners based on location. On their website, we showed local groomers or kennels with Google Map, displayed weather forecast for 3 days via OpenWeather, and provided relevant content recommendations for pet activities.
- Profiling: We created a feature to recognize identified users when they come back to the website and allow them to reply to a series of question, and enabled progressive profiling of users in 6 steps.
- Personalizing: On the website, we showed content recommendations based on tags from current articles, popularity of the articles against classes of matching, previous articles viewed and type of Pet, and we enabled content recommendations for users in 6 steps.
- Keeping loyal: Our solution recognized returning identified users when they came back to the website and when they previously viewed the content recommendation widget, and enabled recommendations to users in 4 steps.
For Nestlé, these solutions resulted in +6% in sales, +10% in brand affinity, and -37% in bounce rate. We also talked about creating a pet passport to build a personal relationship with the brand for each pet owner, and containing useful information such as nutritional, medical and pet owner personality insights. With the interspecies Internet, we could actually enrich this highly precise pet passport by including information on the pet’s personality and needs, personalized in 1-1 for each animal.
Summary of the pet passport solution for Nestlé Purina
The interspecies Internet’s objective extends beyond mere decoding of animal communication. It represents a significant step towards forming meaningful relationships with different species, deepening our understanding of the natural world, and extending empathy beyond human connections. In the same vein, integrating the Interspecies Internet to NextUser’s platform could revolutionize marketing, leading to a more inclusive, insightful, and innovative approach. This leap would allow businesses not only to acknowledge our planet’s diversity but to learn from it and create impactful, meaningful connections across species in an interconnected world.
Through this fun summer edition article, we aimed at being imaginative, but also highlighting how futuristic data collecting and marketing can be. Relying on various fields of studies, marketers will probably one day be able to anticipate and adapt to mostly everything. In a world were Quantum Marketing spreads its wings a bit more each day, we will be capable of collecting data on “everything, everywhere, all at once”. We can’t wait to see where the future of technology will lead us.
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