Food, Glorious Food
Customised shoe and clothing designs are already familiar features on big brand sites. But my favourite example of this technology’s application so far has come out of left field – Domino’s Pizza. As featured on Adverblog, the delivery company’s ‘Pizza Builder’ function allows customers to create their own combination of toppings before ordering.
Apart from being extremely convenient and a lot of fun, it can become a small social activity and talking point for a group of friends. This only adds to the site’s stickiness and with a limitless range of customised pizza options, you are not likely to exhaust the menu for a very long time. If a health kick is more your thing, Tesco’s Healthy Living Tracker is a fantastic new site that allows you to input your daily food intake (right down to the specific product brand and portion size) to assess – and improve – your day to day diet. At the point of registration, they cleverly ask for your Clubcard details – no doubt to fine-tune the offers that will be sent through in the future.
This is an unashamed example of Tesco vying for Weight Watchers’ top spot in the healthy eating market (right down to implementing its own points system) and, in Tesco’s favour, there is no fee to join. The whole site has the look and feel of a journal that, dependent on the degree of information you input, delivers an entirely personalised stream of appropriate eating recommendations.
It’s an extremely intelligent tool from their perspective – actively encouraging purchase, engendering store loyalty and growing their data insights into customer behaviour. But ultimately the user does very well out of it too and that will be the key to its longer term success.
Retail Nirvana
This entry’s title is taken from a recent thought-piece penned by Marco Scognamiglio for Precision Marketing, in which he predicted the future of retail marketing:
“Those who successfully integrate experiential into the already powerful direct marketing armoury will be a long way down the road to truly owning the customer experience.”
The ‘science of shopping’ is a well established research area, pioneered by Paco Underhill who has spent a lifetime painstakingly studying reams of CCTV-style footage to determine the common behaviours of customers in retail environments. Many of his insights have now become commonplace practices (e.g. placing ‘necessary’ items at the back of the store) but one particular emerging digital technology look set to make point-of-sale even more engaging and competitive.
Keep an eye out this year for interactive floor displays. Sensitive to human movement, these video projections allow customers to affect the image they are standing on by moving around any spare limbs that are not entangled in a shopping basket or trolley. We’ve seen this technology promoted before for high street window displays. But placement on, say, a supermarket floor has the potential to literally stop customers in their tracks (and has great curiosity value for children). It may even prove useful to encourage customers to spend longer periods in parts of the store that don’t receive as much footfall.
In sum, it has the potential to function as an entertainment spot people return to on their shopping trips, build brand awareness and grow purchase consideration for products that surround the projection. Thirty ‘sensitive floors’ are expected in UK shopping centres by the end of the year.
Farewell to the paper Shelf-Talker?
A curious innovation currently being trialled in the US is electronic signage. This supposedly resigns the good old paper/cardboard shelf-talker to the scrap heap, as its supporters argue that it eliminates the need for ‘manual labour’ to change signs around and – they are keen to point out – is environmentally conscious. I’m not so convinced. The amount of electricity required to power the vast number of pricing signs found in a supermarket is surely even less eco-friendly.
There are some advantages to the technology though – the ease of programming prices for thousands of store items within moments (though this requires someone skilled to get the database right) and the ability to raise/lower prices in real-time “targeting a specific customer at a specific time of day.” The latter innovation could cause problems – I’m not sure people would be too happy to learn that picking up something for lunch costs more at 8.50am than at 9.10am.
This economic model is already well practiced in a different context by the likes of Tesco, whose ‘pop-in’ Metro products have a higher price than the exact same items in their large scale stores – a ‘convenience’ margin based on geographical location.
But a margin based on the time of day within the same store risks annoying customers, even if the price is based on their specific lifetime value to the store. Could this lead to the rise of ‘sandwich arbitrage’ – peer-to-peer sandwich trading between colleagues at the office?
2008: Prediction round-up
Past experience has shown me the foolishness of offering up predictions. And after years of saing the same thing, I’ve got fed up of telling everyone that ‘mobile is going to be huge’.
So, I’ll let others braver than me tell you what they think 2008 has in store:
Mark at Mashable offers up some interesting views on social networking, intellectual property, web applications, video and cool gadgets. I think he could well be right about OpenSocial and Android facilitating the convergance of mobile and web 2.0
Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion gives his view on digital trends for 2008 and bets on advertisers owning their own media and migrating away from traditional formats like the banner. It’s already happening (see Walmat’s checkout blog).
The Guardian Newspaper (bottles it a bit, like me) and opts to let it’s readers give their own predictions. Most sensible suggestions seems to be, “It’ll be the year of the touchscreens”.
ReadWriteWeb has some interesting thoughts on privacy (nod, nod, think I agree), most likely start-ups to be acquired, and China.
More consultancy type predictions from McKinsey – I like their ideas on extracting more value from interactions.
Tongue firmly in cheek O’Reilly Radar talks about the future of Web 2.0.
And if anyone should know, you’d expect it to be the Futurist magazine, so here are their thoughts. Less digital, more geopolitical, although I do like their no.10 prediction – ‘more decisions will be made by non-human entities’ – ie
Human Tetris
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