Customers want the "in-store experience" to continue online

Lots of people have spent an unhealthy amount of time writing about the importance of the retail experience -- the environment, the products, the thrill of the hunt -- whatever it is that turns an average shopping outing into something a bit more unique, personalized and fun. In fact, shopping is increasingly become a pass time for many who will spend hours going from store to store even when they have no plans to purchase anything (so I'm told -- the concept is pretty foreign to me personally). But I was pretty surprised to find that online shoppers are starting to expect the same kind of "shoppers high" on the web as they do in brick-and-mortar stores. And as this article from the Retail Bulletin notes, with fickle shoppers easily able to bounce from one virtual store to the next, that's causing a lot of sleepless nights for the e-commerce gurus working behind the scenes at many of the most famous retail chains:

Customers demand an experience that is functional and easy to use. Tickbox.co.uk recently found that 90 per cent of users would happily switch to a competitor if a site fails to load. However, they also want to feel genuinely welcomed and see strong continuation of the brand they know and love. A visit to your web site should only further encourage the loyalty that your customers feel for you. As such, it should be remembered that online storefronts are now an integral part of the business for any retailer, and need to present themselves as much more than just an online catalogue of products. Every website needs to reflect the same brand values and aesthetics as your other customer touch-points, be it in store, via email or through your call centre.

With evidently such little brand loyalty, many retailers are turning to multi-channel programs that mix online loyalty features with calls to the brick-and-mortar stores where it's easier to stand apart from competition (and the competition is literally harder to get to than online). The article recommends using a web-based presence not just as a product catalog, but instead as a sales tool designed to provide a personalized brand experience, thus moving the traditional in-store experience into the shopper's home. The web can also be used to drive traffic to slower moving lines that might fit particularly well with the shopper's tastes depending on information collected as part of the aforementioned loyalty program. In the end, the article states, retail stores are still the best place to follow the 80/20 rule of sales (where 80% of sales are generated on the top 20% of products), but with the web there's now a cost-effective way to tap the "long tail" effect by connecting customers with ideal, though harder to find, products.


Tags: out-of-home advertising, retail marketing

Advertising Age offers advice for targeting college-age consumers

It's back-to-school time, and as practically any retailer will tell you, B2S is quickly becoming another critical season (maybe even second to Christmas). While college-age shoppers are notorious for being fickle and hard to target, this article from Advertising Age notes that their fondness for cable TV and web surfing is giving marketers much better control over how and when they show their ads:

When it comes to advertising, for example, students are just as much about viral marketing as they are about keeping it verbal. Two-thirds of students said they learn about new brands, products and services they would like to purchase from friends, with 61% citing word-of-mouth as their preferred method of communication. That's up considerably from 2004, when 48% said they prefer word-of-mouth advertising. Of the brands most important for students to share with their friends, movies and electronics are the two key categories, with 60% citing movies and 48% citing electronics, respectively.

"Word-of-mouth is possibly seeing more strength in the advertising category [because] it's not perceived by most college students to be an advertising platform or a marketing tactic," Ms. Skey said. "It's just an information source or a social media of sorts."

As a result, social-networking patterns have changed in the last three years as well among the college demo. Ms. Skey said students are maintaining fewer personal profiles across the many
social-networking options (down from an average of 17 in 2004 to 7 in 2007), but keeping more friends on average in less places. Essentially, they've already gone to the trouble of aggregating their potential audience reach for marketers hoping to reach them on MySpace and Facebook.

Both of these trends seem to indicate that it's going to be harder to optimize in-store media for this demographic as media choices continue to expand and (consequently) target specificity continues to improve. However, one thing that we do have going in our favor is that because our medium is place-based, it already has an extra degree of specificity that broadcast TV and even cable lack. Can we use the fact that our screens are in stores to better connect with this key demographic during this very important time of year (in the retail calendar, anyway... down here in Florida I'm personally waiting for the beginning of "yay, I can go outside again" season, which usually starts in late October).

I think the answer is yes, provided that the advertisers running content on the screens are willing to do a little more integration work. Many of these companies are already using social networking and word-of-mouth campaigns to build buzz and gain mindshare with 18-24 year olds need to extend these projects into the store on their POP displays, and of course their in-store media. The latter could prove especially beneficial, since they can be updated frequently to reflect the dozens or hundreds of minute changes that often take place in below-the-line efforts like organized word-of-mouth.

I've still yet to see advertisers jump on board with a truly integrated in-store advertising campaign, but as they continue to work harder to reach ever more elusive and media savvy demographics, it seems like it will only be a matter of time before this becomes commonplace.

Product packaging takes center stage

I think there's some unofficial rule that says "when the New York Times talks about it, you know it's news." So needless to say, this article about the new importance of product packaging strikes me as something important to talk about. I for one have always been a sucker for packaging. Your company has a reputation for killing puppies and your products could be lethally toxic, but if you put them in a cool, shiny package, I'm going to be drawn to them (thankfully I don't often buy them, but seriously, the packaging can't do all the work).

Apparently Kleenex, Pepsi and a host of other big CPG manufacturers have figured this out, as they're all starting major packaging reworks in an effort to capture the imaginations (and paychecks) of more shoppers. Kleenex is abandoning it's iconic (and cheap to produce) square boxes for a new oval shape hoping to appeal to your inner interior designer. Coors has new beer bottle labels that change color when the beer has reached its ideal temperature (granted you'll still be drinking Coors -- no miracles here). But my favorite example has to be Pepsi, who will be changing the design of its Mountain Dew bottle a dozen or more times this year, all in hopes of attracting more attention on the shelf. Here's my favorite part of the article:

Laurent Nielly, who heads packaging innovation for Pepsi in North America, said young people -- Pepsi’s central audience -- have shorter attention spans than previous generations, so bottles and other containers have to change more often. Pepsi is experimenting with the designs on its Mountain Dew bottles, selling aluminum bottles covered in graffiti-like designs that will be changed 12 times from May to October. The bottles are sold only in eastern Virginia now, but the soda maker may expand the approach if sales of the bottles go well.

If products aren’t spraying consumers, they may someday be talking to them.

Some companies are studying technology to put a computer chip and tiny speaker inside a package. This idea might be particularly useful for big companies like Unilever that want to cross-promote their various brands. So a package of cheese could say “I go well with Triscuit crackers” when a shopper takes it off the shelf. As the costs of the chips come down, marketing executives said this and other technologies would appear more on shelves.

The mental image I get is pretty amusing, but one could also imagine the aisles of your everyday supermarket becoming much more noisy and annoying. Still, the inevitable march of progress suggests that such innovations are a virtual certainty -- at least until customers rebel against those overly-helpful packages of cheese and Triscuits.

Tags: retail media, packaging, marketing at retail

In India, chaos equals retail sales

The Wall Street Journal published a really fascinating article about Pantaloon Retail (India) Ltd., India's largest retailer, and their discoveries that western retail innovations don't always translate neatly to other countries with different ideologies and histories. In fact, even simple, seemingly common-sense features like quiet stores, wide, straight aisles and fresh, clean produce (basically the hallmark of a good supermarket here in the US) take on decidedly different meanings in India. Says Kishore Biyani, president of the firm, "The shouting, the untidiness, the chaos is part of the design." The WSJ provides some further explanation:

[When] Mr. Biyani tried that in Western-style
supermarkets he opened in India six years ago, too many customers
walked down the wide aisles, past neatly stocked shelves and out the
door without buying.
Mr. Biyani says he soon figured out what he was doing
wrong. Shopping in such a sterile environment didn't appeal to the
lower middle-class shoppers he was targeting. They were more
comfortable in the tiny, cramped stores -- often filled with haggling
customers -- that typify Indian shopping. Most Indians buy their fresh
produce from vendors who keep vegetables under burlap sacks. Even the dirty, black-spotted onions serve a function. For the average
Indian, dusty and dirty produce means fresh from the farm, he says.

Yet while he has worked hard to de-westernize the customer-facing portion of his operation, Biyani has adopted many high-tech innovations to optimize things behind-the-scenes, using fancy ERP software and just-in-time inventorying to maximize profitability and ensure that his company runs as efficiently as possible.

Interestingly, Biyani notes that while the market-style approach of his grocery stores is designed to appeal to lower- and middle-income Indians (who make up the vast majority of the population), he has had success introducing Western-style stores (with clean floors, air conditioning, and well-merchandised goods) catering to more affluent Indians, so exposure to other cultures -- and probably the "brand image" that those cultures carry -- does seem to play some role in shoppers' expectations of how a store should look, feel and function.

Tags: retail advertising, merchandising, India

Getting the store ready for pre-shoppers

Just a few months ago I did a blog on pre-shopping, citing a study that suggested around 2/3 of shoppers do some research online before making a purchase in-store. While 66% is certainly nothing to sniff at, compared to the amazing 89% that this Yahoo! study estimates (brought to my attention by this article at Retail Design Diva), it seems like a drop in the bucket. From the study:

• 
  Consumers exposed to online advertising are more engaged:
  Consumers exposed to display and/or search advertising viewed an
  average of six more pages during the period in which they were
  researching compared to those not exposed to advertising.

• 
  Almost 90 percent of the incremental sales generated by online
  advertising take place in-store: Consumers exposed to online
  advertising spent an incremental six dollars in-store for every one
  dollar spent online.

• 
  Integrated search and display campaigns have maximum impact:
  Combined search and display ad campaigns resulted in deeper engagement
  for consumers exposed to those ads, leading to increased sales.
  

In my own blog article on pre-shoppers, I focused on the importance of using in-store displays to better tune the brick-and-mortar shopping experience for pre-shoppers. For example, POP displays and digital signs can encourage a purchase or improve the perception of suitability of a product/brand by using an information-driven approach to allow shoppers to tick off items on their mental checklist. Likewise, making signage that can communicate a message in less than the 3 seconds that P&G estimates is available for a "First Moment of Truth" is essential to entice shoppers who already know most of the brand's promises from their research.

It's pretty hard to simultaneously optimize in-store POP for shoppers who know nothing about a product and shoppers who have done some research, but 90% of incremental sales generated by online ads take place in store, so we know that shoppers are getting armed not only with information, but also brand and product preferences long before they reach the store. One thing's for sure: staying on message for those last few feet and last few seconds before a customer makes a selection in-store will become increasingly more important.

Tags: out-of-home advertising, retail advertising, merchandising

Nielsen study reveals four different shopping mindsets

As usual, RetailWire has another great discussion going on, this time about a recent Nielsen study which describes four different "mindsets" that consumers may experience while grocery shopping. As Tom Ryan, the discussion's leader notes, "knowing the differences can help brands and retailers better target customers by category." The four modes are:

• Auto-Pilot - Shoppers grab 'n go. Typical categories: margarine, mayonnaise, bottled water, nuts, coffee, popcorn, carbonated soft drinks, hot cereal, cheese and cold cuts.
• Buzz-Activated - Shoppers are open to buzz and engaging advertising. Categories: energy and sports drinks, chocolate, ready-to-drink tea and yogurt drinks.
• Variety-Activated - Shoppers seek new tastes, new formats. Categories: cookies, salad dressing, chewing gum, salty snacks, breakfast bars and cold cereal.
• Bargain-Activated - Shoppers compare prices and hunt for promotions. Categories: canned tuna, canned tomatoes, canned fruit and pasta sauce.

These mental contexts describe not only how the shoppers think, but also how they act, respond to different kinds of in-store promotions, how they navigate the store, and how they make purchases. While this kind of customer segmentation could certainly yield interesting data if used to categorize shoppers on every trip (e.g. with the help of a swiped loyalty card to link different shopping trips and baskets together), as many in the discussion noted, it's not necessarily the most useful way to divide up shopping habits. My favorite comment from the discussion came from Herb Sorensen, the Global Scientific Director for Shopper Insights at TNS Sorensen. Here's his take:

We found that when we let 75,000 shoppers in three different major supermarket chains sort themselves into groups, there ended up being three groups: quick trippers, fill-in shoppers, and stock up shoppers. No surprises there, and this was based only on a selection of behavioral characteristics (walking speed, length of trip, number of items purchased, etc. - hierarchical cluster analysis) and no attitude or demographic measures.

The valuable part of the finding was that six categories were purchased in quantity by all three groups; another half dozen were purchased mostly by the second two groups; and a final half dozen categories were purchased predominantly by the stock-up shoppers. This makes possible a rational scheme for merchandising a SELECTION of these 18-20 categories in an intuitive (for the shopper), instinctual manner.

So rather than sort by basket contents or mental context, Sorenson found that a natural segmentation came from the shopper's needs. Moreover, in this case that segmentation correlates very nicely with trip duration, which gives marketers even more to think about when trying to attract the attention of these various groups. Sorensen's final thought on the matter is telling: "Too many segmentation schemes are too complicated and too intellectual to allow practical execution on the sales floor." I think we may overlook that from time to time, as we become ever more engrossed in collecting and tabulating data. While deep wells of knowledge about individual shopping trips can be extremely useful, it's all for naught if no practical application can come from it.

Tags: shopper segmentation, retail media, retail advertising

Accenture study says room for improvement for service at retail

We've all been there -- casually browsing and minding our own business at a local store, when all of a sudden a salesrep appears from nowhere to begin "the conversation." Trying to assure the salesman that you're just looking around might get him to back off to a far corner of the store, but rest assured, the moment you pause, scratch your head or look up, he's going to pounce again, in the name of customer service.

Or maybe you've found yourself at the local electronics store purchasing a new TV, DVD player, or other high-tech gadget. You go to the counter ready to make your purchase, but the salesrep won't let you pay until you've gotten the full 10-minute spiel on upgraded cables, an extended warranty, and professional installation services.

Does it bother you? It sure as hell annoys me. And apparently I'm not alone. According to a recent study from Accenture, "During at least one of their last four visits, 89 percent of consumers with annual income below $50K became irritated by a retailer’s actions; 94 percent of consumers with annual income between $50K and $99K became irritated; and 95 percent with incomes of $100K or more became irritated." Ok, so for all intents and purposes, nearly everybody has been irritated by a retail experience in one of their last four outings to the store.

While cross-sell and up-sell opportunities still abound at retail, and many customers in Accenture's survey admitted they'd be willing to spend more than they had originally anticipated if the conditions were right (e.g. they were at one of their preferred retailers, they received preferential treatment for their loyalty, etc.), too many retailers botch the opportunity by offering the wrong level of service (either too much or too little), or the wrong sales pitch. Accenture recommends a four-part strategy to help improve matters, making sure that the Right person with the Right skills always be available to the consumer at the Right place, and at the Right time.

Want to know what they recommend? Then I suggest you download the PDF.

Tags: customer service, retail experience

R/GA to open retail agency

Last year, Saatchi & Saatchi introduced Saatchi X to help Wal-Mart and others master the art and science of in-store marketing. This year, to get a leg up on competition preparing to follow along, Interpublic Group's R/GA is joining in on the fun and creating their own retail division. From this article at CNN:

"We think there is a great opportunity for retailers to create innovative and informative experiences as the cost of the enabling technologies continues to fall," said Bob Greenberg, CEO and global chief creative officer of R/GA. "By carefully integrating digital display and interactive technologies retailers can enhance promotions and help customers have a better branded and more meaningful shopping experience. Over the years we've shown that in-store digital strategies are very cost effective and profitable."

John Jones, 40, previously technical creative director, has been appointed executive creative director of the offering. He is charged with building up R/GA's retail capabilities, including in-store digital product displays, games and digital signage, plus overseeing the development of new methods of customer interaction. He will report to Nick Law, chief creative officer, NA, to ensure that the in-store experience is also a branded environment.

The firm certainly isn't a stranger to in-store work, having done all sorts of non-traditional marketing projects both at the store-level and elsewhere out-of-home, but this is the first time that they've articulated a more generalized approach to the market. Of all the interactive marketing, kiosk and digital signage projects that I've seen or heard about coming from them, I think my favorite has to be their promotion with Nike that allowed people in New York's Times Square to use their cellphones to build their own custom Nike shoe, and see the results on one of the Square's huge outdoor electric billboards.

So now that Publicis Groupe and Interpublic Group both have retail agencies in their portfolios, how long will it be before we see similar groups emerge under Omnicom and WPP? Sure, they both have a handful of companies that specialize in retail media measurement, research, and other critical but often less-than-sexy endeavors, but neither has a bona fide retail advertising agency... yet.

Technorati Tags: retail, media,R/GA,digital, signage,advertising

P&G looks to tiny tiendas for big growth

While Wal-Mart is P&G's single largest customer, as a percentage, they derive a much larger amount of revenue by selling into thousands of small, high-frequency stores frequently found throughout developing countries. While the stores may be tiny, collectively they add up to big business, as the WSJ recently illustrated. "Sales of P&G products in developing markets currently total $20 billion, up from $8 billion five years ago. In recent years, emerging markets have contributed about 40% of the company's "organic" sales growth, which excludes gains from acquisitions.... Last year P&G derived 26% of sales in these regions."

With that kind of growth it's no surprise that P&G is actively pursuing more business in these high-frequency stores. And while they've primarily competed on price and brand-power alone till recently, the company is now adding a new approach to the mix: providing merchandising advice. Since most of these stores are tiny -- many are run out of a small room on someone's home -- space is at a premium, and stores carry at most two or three brands for most product categories. This can be challenging for a company like P&G, who might make several different brands all by themselves, or might be trying to sell a full line card into a store that already carries as much product as their space allows.

To combat this, P&G is introducing new integrated displays that come fully stocked with a complete range of products, and they're working aggressively to "own" the space behind the cashier's counter. As the article notes, "P&G calls space nearest the cashier the 'hot zone,' and considers it the most valuable real estate in these small stores. Since more than 60% of customers already know what they're going to buy, P&G figures, little time is spent browsing. But P&G researchers found that shoppers tend to gaze at the cashier's area for a precious five seconds as they wait for the owner to hand them a product or get their change -- a prime opportunity to influence future purchases."

The company is also taking a page from Frito-Lay and having local distributors re-stock shelves, which cuts down on labor required by the store owner, but also ensures that the P&G products are shown in the best possible conditions. Likewise, they've ditched efforts to have their own sales force handle sales to each store (there are over 220,000 in Mexico alone), in favor of having local entrepreneurs handle that part of the business.

Tags: merchandising, POP displays, marketing at retail

A theatrical approach to experience design...

... is exactly what this PDF from ExperienceDesign advocates, and after flipping through 20 pages of informative and entertaining, I think this is a great way to re-frame the debate over how to improve customer experiences at retail. While probably not new to anybody who has spent a long time in the industry (I haven't), the tips in this introductory piece are thoughtful and insightful.

The root of the argument is that many parts of a retailer's environment are analogous to stage theatrics, from sales floor (stage) to personnel (actors) to customer base (audience), and by taking some cues from the theater world -- where the entire point of the gig is to entertain and have the audience begging for more by the end of the show -- retailers might just be able to give their customers a more satisfying experience.

The tips are divided into three broad categories (or acts, if you're trying to keep up with the theatrical lingo), each with four main points (scenes):

• Act I, Scene 1. Storyboarding: Boom-wowowow-BOOM!: Your first impression should be fantastic, but your last one needs to be spectacular.
• Act I, Scene 2. The making of: Show off hidden values so that customers get a fuller understanding and appreciation of the products/services you're providing.
  
• Act I, Scene 3. Prequels and sequels: Extend customer contacts outside the store and after the last in-store contact to build a lasting relationship.
  
• Act I, Scene. 4. Depth: finding beauty, authenticity and meaning: Cater to your customers' values, not just their wallets.
  

• Act II, Scene 1. Stage building: Use store architecture to further convey the core brand message.
  
• Act II, Scene 2. Backstage and exits: Likewise, always draw attention towards the meaningful parts of the environment.
  
• Act II, Scene 3. Let there be light: Lighting can make good things look better and bad things look worse. Use it liberally but wisely.
  
• Act II, Scene 4. Costume: Your staff's uniform, whether formal or informal, communicates your brand position as well, so make sure you know what it's saying.
  

• Act III, Scene 1. Rehearse: If your store is beautiful but your staff is untrained, unenthusiastic, or just plain inept, people will notice and avoid you like the plague.
  
• Act III, Scene 2. Get the lines right: Are there wrote lines that your staff delivers 100 times a day? Could they maybe be a little better/more informative/more fun than they are right now?
• Act III, Scene 3. Let stars be stars: Everyone on your team has some character, so let it stand out. As a corollary to this, be honest, not fake.
  
• Act III, Scene 4. Timing is everything: Knowing when to deliver the punch line, whether it be a complement, critique, or simply presenting the evening's bill, can be just as important as knowing what to say.

Tags: store design, experience, experiential marketing

Home Depot focuses on retail experience

The AP notes that in the wake of former CEO Bob Nardelli's resignation, the Home Depot will be shifting strategies a bit to sell off its Home Depot Supply business (catering to professional construction companies and contractors) in order to free up some cash, buy back some shares, and focus exclusively on its retail stores.

While both the AP story and the original press release are unclear about how some of the estimated $10.3B from the sale will be used in-store, recently the company has been criticized for poor customer service and challenging store layouts, especially in contrast to rival Lowes, who has made great strides in both of these areas. I'd thus expect to see a wave of hiring (there's never somebody in an orange apron around when you need them!), hopefully some improved wayfinding signage and maybe even a planogram change, and there's even the possibility to install some retail media services or interactive kiosks to provide supplemental services.

Tags: Home Depot, retail experience

P&G to commit $2B to retail-marketing efforts

As Advertising Age announced a few days ago,

Procter & Gamble Co. is preparing to give some $2 billion in retail-marketing funds a seat at the same table as advertising.

The company is partially consolidating its marketing groups to put retail-marketing strategy under the same marketing directors who oversee brand teams instead of under the group that manages the sales force. Once the new system is introduced, general managers or marketing directors who find a brand responds better to trade marketing than consumer marketing will be able to shift more funds in-store. This should make for a more genuinely discipline-agnostic P&G.

The move aims to answer questions that long have dogged package-goods marketers: who should control the tens of billions of dollars spent on trade promotion -- often the largest part of the marketing budget -- and how to make those dollars work in the same strategic plan as advertising and consumer promotion.

Analysts estimate that Procter and Gamble spends over $2 billion a year on trade marketing, which is about twice as much as the entire digital signage industry generates right now. Of course, if you were to throw in all POP displays and merchandising the market is quite a bit larger, but a $2B addition is still extremely significant.

While there's no reason to think that 100% of that amount will be channeled in store -- after all, there are lots of other techniques like direct mail, online and event/promotion that could be successful -- given P&G's past indications that in-store marketing techniques (like digital signage) are becoming increasingly important it's probably safe to bet that we'll see some new things in-store from them (literally).

Here's the real question, though. If P&G is successful with this new plan, how/when will we find out about it? And will there be a cascade effect, where other major CPGs suddenly jump in and start redirecting large portions of their advertising budgets?

Tags: P&G, in-store marketing, marketing at retail

Dressing up the lowly gift card

In the course of reading this little article in PROMO Magazine, I started to think about the process of purchasing a gift. These days, pre-paid, branded gift cards are a huge business You can buy a branded gift card for virtually any retailer, get instant personalized gift cards using custom photography, and number of variations on that theme. While the PROMO article looks at the use of new and better packaging to dress up gift cards so that they're more suitable for gift-giving, I approached the process from the other end, thinking about the steps somebody might go through that would lead to the purchase of a gift card as a gift.

Let's face it. A lot of people still feel like giving a gift card is just a cop-out. Even those people who hate shopping for gifts, or don't know the recipient particularly well. I think perhaps we've all gotten the impression that a gift purchasing experience should either be a) amazingly easy (in the case where you know what the perfect gift for somebody is), or b) excruciatingly difficult (as if the expenditure of time on your part is going to be translated into that gift, and the recipient will immediately know how much you care due to this).

The industry's response has been to add personalization capabilities, prettier graphics, and more graphical choices. This gives the shopper the ability to either a) immediately find the perfect gift card image, thus satisfying the "it should be easy" condition, or b) spend hours flipping through a catalogue of gift card entries, or even better, use some custom photos and graphics to make a unique card himself, thus satisfying the "it should be hard" condition.

I actually think there's another part to the process, though, and that's the retailer's obligation to present the card as a valid gift. Again, new packaging does address some of that. By making the cards festive and interesting, there's an implicit understanding that the item being purchased needs to be special, not just a piece of plastic. Catering to those who don't catch the implicit vibes, lots of stores have started to feature the cards prominently at checkout aisles and on endcaps in order to make sure that everybody knows that they're there in the event that even after all that hard shopping, the shopper can't find that perfect gift and has to "settle."

But while they've certainly improved their displays since the gift card really exploded a few years ago, I still get the feeling that they're relegated to second-class status when it comes to store design. Hanging pegboards and flimsy cardboard displays are hardly a great way to showcase a high-margin, nearly universally-acceptable product, but few retailers that I've seen seem to agree with me. You know you're going to be selling these things forever, and they don't take up a huge amount of space. Why not build in some great-looking permanant displays to merchandise them like the high-margin items they are?

Bringing online shoppers back into the store

Dave Polinchock over at Brand Experience Labs wrote a little blurb on a company called NearbyNow, who has the formidable task of encouraging online shoppers to make purchases in-store. They do this via a combination of web-based marketing and advertising (including optimizing retailers' web sites), traffic generation, and a bunch of analytics software to monitor progress. The general idea is that even if shoppers can already look for discounts, sales and coupons online (and they do), there are still a host of reasons for shoppers to actually complete the purchase process in the bricks-and-mortar world. Given how easy it is to buy just about anything online and have it delivered to the doorstep these days (I did about 75% of my Christmas shopping online last year -- Amazon free shipping rocks!), it's getting harder for many retailers to articulate their benefits over purely-digital shopping.

That's where NearbyNow comes in. From this article in the St. Pete Times:

"We're adding a Google-style product search that makes mall sites relevant to how people shop today, " said Dunlap. Follow-up surveys found one in 10 shoppers who used NearbyNow said it influenced an ultimate purchase. One in 100 tried to reserve something.

Reserving stuff, though, is hard to pull off.

Some chains can handle queries by e-mail directly to and from each store. Most do not. So NearbyNow telephones each store from a Kansas call center. Some store clerks will check the racks, some won't. Some will hold products for a customer for 24 hours, others won't. NearbyNow promises a response within 90 minutes, but the average is 20 minutes.

Westfield pays nothing for the NearbyNow hookup. But all of its stores and mall kiosks get a free text listing of what they want summoned for product searches.

This is clearly a logistical play as much as it is a tech play, and from just these few paragraphs it's pretty clear that a lot of retailers don't yet grasp how important these kinds of services will become as the Internet shopping experience continues to improve. Still, we're a long ways off from the time when we can strap into a virtual reality suit and navigate products just as we do in the real world. Until then, bricks-and-mortar retailers will continue to have a significant advantage with any product line that does best in a try-and-touch instead of a show-and-tell situation.

Tags: NearbyNow, store experience, advertising

Raft of new inventions promise wireless power, interactive packaging

While most of the new companies and individuals that we've worked with these past few years have been skilled, educated and competent, every once in a while we'll get a call from somebody who -- knowingly or not -- asks for the impossible. Not low pricing impossible or new software development impossible. I'm talking about real law of physics-breaking, time-travel and unicorns impossible. Of all the crazy and inane-sounding requests, my favorite has to be the demand for wireless power. Of course such a capability would be a great boone at home, at work, and of course... in the retail store.

Well, if a bunch of researchers at MIT get their way, I may soon have to poking fun at people and instead start learning about wireless power infrastructure. That's right, they can light up a 60W bulb from 15 feet away with no wires, and there's a good chance that the enabling technology (which uses finely-tuned magnetic fields to deliver the power safely across short distances) will find its way into the consumer sector in the coming years.

As if that wasn't enough, Swedish researchers have identified a way to bring interactivity to static posters and packages by laminating a conductive polymer to standard heavy-duty posterboard. As New Scientist notes,

The billboards are made almost entirely from paper materials, making them cheap to assemble, and easy to recycle, says Gulliksson. "We've used the roll-to-roll methods used by industry to process paper materials."

To make the paper surfaces interactive, the team screen prints patterns using conductive inks containing particles of silver that overlap, allowing a current to flow.

The interactive billboard is made in layers with a 3 centimetres thick back layer of Wellboard - a kind of extra-strong cardboard - forming the base. A sheet of paper screen-printed with conductive ink is placed on the base, with a second sheet carrying the billboard's design placed on top.

The middle conductive layer is connected to a power supply and simple microelectronics that play, pause and rewind sounds when the correct sensors are triggered.

Touch sensors are made using a fine pattern of conductive lines in which the current flow is altered when a hand touches it. Laptop computer touchpads use the same principal.

Speakers are made by printing electromagnets out of conductive ink and stretching the paper over a cavity like a speaker cone behind the billboard. The electromagnets vibrate in response to a current, creating a sound.

Touch- and sound-enabled posters are only the beginning, though. Once the process is perfected, I'd expect this kind of technology to quickly find its way into POP displays and even product packaging, where it could add both novelty and utility to an area that could use some excitement.