Kudos to the Clarityn team for dreaming this one up. Clarityn, if you haven’t heard of it, is a hayfever relief drug sold in the UK. I’ve used it myself many times and it does work for me. The team there have launched a ‘real time’ Pollen Forecast app. They’ve actually named it ‘Pollen Forecast UK’ and given it the familiar Clarityn logo. It’s free, of course. Run the app and it’ll ask for your location and boom, it’ll switch on your camera and then show some whizzing 3D pollen spores darting around the screen as illustrated. Red is bad, Orange is ‘medium’ and yellow is ‘low’.
I’ve had the app on my iPhone for about a week now and I’ve grown accustomed to quickly hitting the welcoming Clarityn icon each morning to see whether I really need to dose up to avoid spending the day sniffing. This is genius, genius marketing. Not only am I liking Clarityn for helping given me an idea as to the day’s pollen count, but I’m seeing the Clarityn logo every time I sweep past my apps on my iPhone. Is this nearing the holy grail when it comes to advertising? It’s measurable — they know how many folk are downloading it. They probably know how many times I’m opening it too, if they’ve got stats tracking embedded into the app and I’m getting my Clarityn ‘brand prompt’ at least once or twice a day. And I’m happy because they’ve given me a reasonably fun way of finding out the pollen count. Like it.
(iTunes link, free)
Great review and a pretty cool app – making a highly functional utility fun…and stimulating lots of discussion in the review section – check out the comments in the app store!. A quirky way of getting a brand that isn't 'exciting' out there to the masses. Bravo.