It’s not unusual for brands to leverage the power of apps to build up goodwill, brand recognition, and to get closer to their customers. However, Zyrtec AllergyCast may be going one step further. The iOS and Android app has a host of useful features:
- Log symptoms and track how you’re feeling in a daily and monthly Allergy Symptom Tracker
- Notifications alert you when pollen is high in your area
- See which pollens are high, and get tips to deal with them.
- Set your favorite places or use your location for fast forecasts.
- Extended 4-day pollen and 10-day weather forecasts
- Hourly weather forecast
And, of course:
- Find Zyrtec products near you
We suffer from allergies so, we cannot be down on the shameless self-promotion app approach here. When you have allergies you belong to Zyrtec. They know it, you know it, and that’s that.
The app gets pollen and weather information from over 10,000 data stations located throughout the US. If you report that you experienced watery eyes on three days last week, AllergyCast essentially looks at the pollen levels in your area to determine the likely source of your discomfort. AllergyCast needs quite a bit of information to pinpoint the cause of allergies. A few days of user input will not reveal much as there will not be enough data to base a forecast on. To motivate people to input information daily, app developers use gamification. Zyrtec gamifies allergies by giving users a chance to play a spin-to-win game for every day they log in to the app. The app also rewards users with charms for using the service regularly. Many of the charms are related to the user’s specific allergies.
