Arts
Avocado app bears fruit all round!
In this age of visual impact marketing, a data and technology company comes up with a digital strategy for customer input to help businesses grow
In this day and age, many collect memories easily through the pictures taken on their phones. Documenting a happy family occasion, a spontaneous fun outing with friends or even just a simple meal enjoyed at a restaurant–it is now easy to look back on special moments.
Now you can reward yourself with the aesthetic pictures you took of your food with Avocado.
Avocado (no, not the fruit) is a new app on the market powered by Surge Global, a marketing, data and technology company that helps businesses grow. “We help businesses come up with digital strategy, help support their efforts and build teams here in Colombo, that help them run the show. The businesses that typically engage with us come in all shapes and sizes, the main thing is that they understand that technology is an important role in their business and they want to leverage it to tell better stories and position themselves on the internet,” says Chief Growth Officer of Surge Bhanuka Harischandra
Avocado was built out of necessity, he says. As Surge worked with brands on improving their marketing, one hurdle Surge faced was lack of physical manpower, with its team of just 50, and the capability to capture content for the widespread brands they worked with.
The premise of Avocado lies with the fact that not all brands are able to create great content consistently, although their customers may have mastered the art of it. Now, when a customer takes a picture of the food they eat at a restaurant, they can upload it onto the Avocado app and get rewarded for the picture they have taken.
Although it sounds pretty straightforward, the inner workings of the app are quite complex. “We use a mix of technology and human intuition to be able to rate, validate and moderate all the content that goes through the platform. A rating system assigns a certain amount of points for each image based on whether it’s a 1 star or a 5 star image,” says Bhanuka adding that the stars are converted to points across a scale of 1-30 and those points act as steps towards a membership tier.
There are three tiers which are bronze, silver and gold with each having its own discount level. However, it is important to keep in mind that the points diminish over time so a customer needs to keep creating content ever so often to stay on the right tier.
Thus far, Avocado has 20 partners on board including Cafe Kumbuk, Tea Avenue, Creamalato, Commons etc despite having launched just last month. Right now, there are at least 50 new pieces of content being created every day and that is how they track the progress of their app, says Bhanuka.
A win-win situation for both patrons and restaurants, Avocado will help the former be rewarded for being loyal customers while their content will generate more marketability for the restaurants’ social media platforms.
In its Beta version, Avocado is set to focus on a lot more than restaurants and dining-in as plans to roll out new features and the app across all parts of the world in 2021 are already in motion. The new app will be fundamentally different and focus around six core activities which will be “Eat, Shop, Live, Play, Stay & Work”.
Avocado can be downloaded through the Apple App store (for iOS) or the Google Play store (Android).