Living in a digital world

“A week is a long time in politics.”, Harold Wilson famously said. Better make that a day - or even a matter of hours - in the online world. The ever expanding range of communicated messages – as part of an official campaign strategy or musings from public networks/forums – means the PR and marketing teams on all political sides need to be able to proactively produce and adapt their responses in real-time.

The BBC has christened this development ‘E-Democracy’ - the emergence of an open platform for politicians and the populus to engage in unrestricted dialogue. As technology has spun forward it has actually brought back the very essence of a ‘vote’ – having a voice. This, of course, can work both ways. Barack Obama, like most of the candidates, has created a unique YouTube page that archives footage of all his speeches.

It is an attractive idea - the web permits every party to promote their own particular line of positive propaganda, free from the regulatory ties that come with television and radio broadcasts. The spirit of fair competition can be thrown out of the window online. The formats employed may be rallying blog entries or engaging video posts but beneath the sheen, this is politics with the gloves off.

Avoiding editorially controlled media may also only be delaying the inevitable. Rather than receiving a slapped wrist from a select group of informed political press commentators, politicians seriously risk leaving themselves open to a barrage of insulting posts in close proximity to their carefully constructed, squeaky clean video links (there aren’t many prime ministers before Gordon Brown who can claim to have been labelled ‘British scum’ so publicly or so often).

Similarly, a throwaway faux-pas that previously would have spread only slowly, can now prompt a fatal backlash in an instant (as in the case of failed presidential hopeful George Allen). Breaking down the barrier between figureheads of influential bodies and the baying crowd, is simultaneously democratic utopia and, behind the scenes, a never ending tightrope act. The challenge for politicians moving forward is no longer that of letting people be heard, but being seen to listen.

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.

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.

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?