How Foursquare’s Innovation Chief Measures Success

Gayle Fuguitt is firm in her conviction that the mobile phone is the answer to achieving precision message delivery. As chief of customer insight and innovation at Foursquare, which in early October closed $33 million in new funding, that makes absolute sense.

1. What is the one marketing topic that is most important to you as an innovator?
Reimagining the future by bridging the digital world and real-world divide–literally connecting digital spaces to physical spaces. By connecting today’s consumers to meaningful experiences and solutions on their most closely held life navigator, their mobile phone, we can now deliver the marketing holy grail: the right message to the right person at the right time.

Consumers’ mobile phones play an indispensable role in their lives, becoming their navigator. Rather than blocking marketing and advertising messages, consumers are inviting their brands to deliver meaningful, location-specific, real-time messages that connect them to learning, dining, shopping, gaming, and entertainment experiences, right at their fingertips.

Location technology is our key to unlocking growth by locating consumers where they are and delivering timely, meaningful messages to them on their terms.

2. Why is this so important?
As digital investments grow exponentially and artificial intelligence becomes a reality, the fact is that consumers actually “vote with their feet.” In other words, no matter what consumers say they’ll do, or what sites and brands they follow on social media, where they personally choose to spend their time as measured in foot traffic is what matters most. 

Actual consumer behavior shows us what’s most important to them, and when and where to best reach them to deliver relevant messages in context.

For example, Touchtunes, a virtual jukebox app-based company with jukeboxes in over 65,000 dining and drinking establishments, partnered with Foursquare to invite consumers to stop into a nearby restaurant or bar to play their favorite tunes while enjoying a favorite drink or meal. This delivered an over 60% increase in app downloads and a 30% increase in spending.

3. How will real-time messaging and delivery improve the customer experience?
Bridging the digital world and real-world divide improves customer experiences as marketers shift from mass markets to custom target audiences, from fact-based brand messaging to meaningful, contextually relevant content. Most importantly, as marketers shift from data facts to integrated data stories, our consumers’ world views and needs will come to life–finally delivering precision at scale: head, heart, and hand to feet.

4. How will this improve the effectiveness of marketing?
The future is here today. 2020 is just around the corner. For the first time, we have the opportunity to bridge the places consumers go in the real world to their handheld digital world. Today’s connected consumers are ready for us to seek them out in real time, deliver meaningful content plus experiences. As marketers, our obligation is to listen and measure well enough to increase the quality and scale of those connections.

Bonus: Fuguitt’s 6 Simple Steps To Unlock Your Future
• Lead with courage vs. caution: Invest in new tech solutions plus partners, lead zero-based budgeting and investment in advertising across all platforms vs. discounting brands.

• Forge collaborative partnerships: Mobile first. If you don’t see the solutions you want, find a partner and build one. Then experiment, learn, and scale to exponentially grow. 

• Shift from demos to custom audience target segments: Translate consumer values to brand value.

• Experiment with mobile creative: Tap location to deliver the right message to the right consumer at the right time—on their terms. 

• Insist on timely, integrated KPIs and measurement: Raise the bar for your tech to deliver brand-safe, transparent, real-time insights that tie marketing ROI to sales growth.

• Run, don’t walk, to the decision table: Represent the head, heart, and, most of all, feet of today’s consumer.