Samsung takes on Apple’s iBeacon world by Storm with Proximity Platform

Devika Girish
Last Updated: April 17, 2018

Last week, at Samsung’s global developer conference 2014, the company unveiled its ambitious plan to enter the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) location-based marketing sphere by launching its own location-based mobile marketing platform called Proximity. The platform allows brands and businesses to push rich context-aware content to customers and engage them better in order to propel brand awareness and sales.

[Tweet “Samsung takes on Apple’s iBeacon world by Storm with Proximity Platform”]

While Proximity platform is the news that made it to the headline, Samsung has also released tools for developers. The company recently launched the Placedge SDK, a software development kit that allows apps on Samsung devices to detect and transmit beacon signals in order to fetch contextual content from the cloud.

According to a recent comScore study, Samsung’s market share is reported to have been steadily rising, with it owning 28.9% of the US market in August 2014. That being the case, merchants can easily leverage this proximity platform to broaden their target customer audience and further raise their sales volume.

Want to leverage beacons? You no longer need an App!

Though Proximity platform works in a similar way to Apple’s iBeacon , there is one main difference – iBeacon relies on marketers persuading users to download an app to access the service, Proximity works at a much deeper level. The platform provides an uber-application, Proximity Service app that sits at the device layer and helps detect a shared registry of beacons and then pushes messages through a shared service. Therefore, to reap the benefits of the Proximity platform all that a customer has to do is: install the Proximity Service app to receive relevant information and coupons from third-party beacons.

[Tweet “Want to leverage beacons? With Samsung Proximity Platform you no longer need an app”]

While this particular feature might seem irresistible to most brands as it allows them to reach even those consumers who haven’t installed their app on their smartphones, it’s not yet clear if it will be all good news for owners of Samsung phones. The company is yet to provide details on how customers can choose alerts that they would like to receive.

[Tweet ” Samsung cuts out the need for a brand to have its own app to detect beacons”]

The other prominent features of the Proximity platform include:

Web Console –The web console provided by the Proximity platform allows marketers to manage venue and beacon information, create campaigns with template libraries and set targeting options, and also analyze customer behaviour through in-depth analytics.
On-Site Management Tool – This tool helps brands manage on-going campaigns and beacon registration.

Consumers could use Proximity platform for a number of things, starting from, receiving discount coupons in a retail store to being guided to their seats in a stadium. Samsung has highlighted a few other use cases for its platform through the following illustration:

And while Samsung has announced that its platform has been integrated with support for beacons provided by manufacturers such as GigaLane, Radius Networks, Roximity, and Swirl, they are yet to release the configuration requirements such as security layers and ad intervals.

If you are planning a beacon pilot, take a look at Beaconstac, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!