Don't Give Up: Four Apps To Help You Keep Your New Year's Resolution

Like many Americans, I find it hard to stick to New Year’s resolutions.  This year, I resolved to do things to improve my overall wellness.  This means exercising regularly, getting plenty of sleep, and maintaining financial wellness.  After struggling to keep my resolution for a month and a half, I decided to pull out the big gun… my iPhone.  Here are four mobile apps that help me keep my 2012 resolution: 

BitGym

BitGym is a mobile app that turns monotonous cardio machine exercise into a fun videogame.  The app uses the iPhone and iPad’s forward-facing camera and accelerometer to power and control a bike down an European bike trail or a gondola through a Venetian canal.

Go! To Sleep  

Sleep is critical to your physical and emotional health.  The Go To Sleep! mobile app helps users monitor sleeping patterns and learn how to optimize their sleep by improving their personal “Sleep Score.”

Morsel

Morsel is a mobile app that makes wellness resolutions a bit less daunting by offering easy-to-achieve micro wellness challenges that add up to a healthier lifestyle.

Mint

Mint is a mobile and web app that aggregates financial accounts online and helps users manage their personal finances.  This makes it easy to set and monitor budgets and achieve savings goals. 

Behavior change through technology is an increasingly hot topic in the health and wellness tech circles.  With raising health costs, corporations are resorting to innovative wellness programs like Keas, to keep employees healthy and costs low.  For these corporations, this isn’t just about keeping a resolution- it is about finding a business solution.  I suspect brands will start taking advantage of these new technologies.  First we will see hyper-relevant ads such as a sleeping aid advertisements that pop up whenever the Sleep Now! user routinely doesn’t get a quality night’s sleep.  Eventually, we will see more brands and agencies partnering together to build their own technology that is relevant, valuable and changes buying behavior.  In other words, who knows what technology we will be using in 2013 to help us stick to our resolutions!

Have you used any apps to help you keep your 2012 resolution?  Have you used any of the above apps in the past?  What was your experience?

Stay well,

Ryan Drumwright

Jr. Planner

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Happy Social Media Week!

This week, across nine cities around the world, hundreds of thousands of people will celebrate Social Media Week—getting together to share ideas about social media and the role that it plays in our society. In our personal lives and certainly as we work with our client partners, we continue to see ways in which social technologies have changed the way people connect with each other and with brands.

In the spirit of sharing and learning, we are happy to sponsor an event of our own, tomorrow, February 8—Convergence: How Social Commerce and Mobile Change the Way We Make Decisions and Shop. We will be joined by experts from across the world of retail, mobile, and e-commerce to discuss how convergence—the coming-together of different devices, technologies, and the Internet—impacts marketing, advertising, and sales.

If you are in New York tomorrow, registration is still open at: http://www.amiando.com/smwnysaatchi.html

If you can't make it, we'll be streaming the event live here at: http://saatchiwellness.blogspot.com and you can follow us on twitter through the hashtag: #smwsaatchi

You can also check out http://socialmediaweek.org for events in San Francisco, Rome, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo, London, Hong Kong, and Istanbul

Happy Social Media Week!

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A Late Christmas Gift

So many brands today compete in commoditized industries, forced to fight tooth and nail with each other for every customer as they tout similar product features and benefits. Nowhere is this more visible than in the mobile phone industry where prices, apps, and coverage maps are the ammo used to fight the competition.

Customers are fickle, and the only thing keeping them from switching providers are exclusive phones and early termination clauses. It's rare to see these brands demonstrate true value or customer-centricity, and why should they when they have these virtual nooses around their customers' necks? Which is what makes my recent experience with T-Mobile even more remarkable.

Over the past few weeks, my BlackBerry had been crashing unexpectedly and on Christmas it did it again, although this time it wouldn't start up anymore (I was greeted by a perpetual hourglass of death). The next day I went to a local T-Mobile store and found out that the 1 year warranty expired two days prior (of course). My last hope: a phone call to Customer Care.

After explaining the situation (and politely reminding the very nice representative that I've been a happy and loyal customer for the past 7 years) T-Mobile did the right thing. They put the customer first and honored the warranty.

But the representative I spoke with didn't stop there. Because I needed to renew my service agreement, she was able to switch me to one of their new "unlimited" plans, saving me money each month. She wasn't just going to fix or replace my old phone, but offered me a brand new device (any one, my choice). Oh, and they'll ship that to me priority service at no charge (after all, it's the holidays and I don't have a phone). And while we're at it, Mr. Martino, the next month is on us. Wow. It really was Christmas on the 26th.

Besides being overjoyed at how lucky I was (after all, the other way this could have gone down ended with me spending several hundred dollars on a new phone), I kept asking myself if other companies would have gone this far. Would AT&T value me as a long time customer the same way? Would Verizon have honored my warranty, even though it expired (I happen to know from past experience that they would not have)?

Commoditized plans and services come and go. Sexy (and exclusive) new phones are always being introduced. But putting a premium on customer service and delivering on it when it matters? That's a rare trait that sets one brand apart from the others and it's why I'll be loyal to T-Mobile for a long time.

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