Retail 2.0
I visited the Technology show room of Galeries Lafayette, the high end French retailer and consumer loans bank.
They are displaying prototypes of new technologies, applied to a department store.
I got a glimpse at what could be a retail store in 3 or 4 years from now;
Innovation can be split into 3 categories:
- ways of getting a much better recognition of the brand, of the ads
- ways of improving the buying experience by displaying instant information about the product the customer is looking at or by providing the customers in real time with profiled information or rebate
- ways of simplifying the action of paying your purchases.
1. Better recognition of a brand
The key idea is to use videos or moving pictures. The best example can be seen in the video of the pool and the red fishes.
It has been used in stores to advertise soft drinks:the customers was walking on ice and made the name of the drink appear below their feet. The recognition results were ten times higher than a traditional ad.
On the Internet we find the same level of efficiency: the transformation into an actual purchase of a product after an Internet ad is 8 times higher when you use rich media (video, animation) than with a traditional static web site.
2. Improving the buyer experience
You can display on a flat screen information about the product the consumer is handling or simply looking at. It’s a simple use of RFID tags or video recognition. You can even recognise which type is the customer(eg: male, between 25 and 45, or female above 50) and display information profiled for this type of category.
A supermarket manager can monitor the sales by product and send SMS to the clients present in the store in order to offer focused rebates on the products which are selling slow. The biggest hurdle for this type of service is not the technology, but the internal rules of retail companies!
3. Speed up the payment of your purchases
In Japan 98% of the mobile handsets enable the customer to read electronic tags put on goods or ads, or to pay their subway card, to buy drinks from machines, to pay their purchases at their local department stores, and a multitude of new applications….
The USA are catching up very rapidly with pilots at Safeway for example where you pay with your mobile: you pay in 3 seconds instead of 19 seconds!
Visa and Mastercard are now allowing to use your mobile phone instead of your credit card.You just enter your pin code and send it by SMS.
Google is about to launch new services and Apple is partnering with Starbucks…
Europe is coming too with experiences in Austria, in Amsterdam.
In japan, the two biggest Telecom operators have just bought two banks..
Who is going to drive the Mobile marketing?
The banks, the retailers or the telecom companies?or Google?
The winner will make big money.
Hi Bertrand,
This is truly a great looking blog with very promising content. So I will definitely add you to my list of favourites. But only if you do the same with Capgemini's CTO blog...!
Cordialement,
Ron Tolido
Posted by: | July 18, 2008 at 10:28 AM