It’s always hard to decide how to market your product or service to potential customers. However, here is an interesting article that Jenrick IT recently found regarding 10 new technologies that can help market your business.

1. Facial Recognition

Giving away free product is a great way to build your brand, right?

Unilever, the company that makes things like Lipton soup and Suave shampoo also makes ice cream and figured it would use some of it to get customers to smile-literally. It worked with the high-tech marketing company SapientNitro in London to make a vending machine called “Share Happy” that uses facial recognition to give people ice cream bars for smiling.

They even designed the box so people can upload their smiling mugs to Facebook, pushing the brand even farther out into the consumer space. When the machine debuted in Lisbon last year, it vended 52,000 ice cream bars in two days with no media support or advertising. That’s about 600 percent more than a regular ice cream machine.

The award-winning box is now on world tour doling out brand recognition as it goes.

“Facial Recognition is being used not only on experiential campaigns but even on digital signage,” says Rob Gonda, global head of emerging technology and innovation for SapientNitro. “For instance, a lot of our installations…detect things like gender, age bracket and start serving more targeted advertising on digital signage and digital displays.”

What’s different today compared to a few years ago, Gonda says, is brands have to be situationally aware and contextually relevant.

(more…)