Bring on-line and physical touchpoints together and deliver a seamless, personalized shopping. Take advantage of physical stores to create compelling experiences for consumers.
differentiated customer relationships mean having a relevant, personal and continuous dialogue based on current context. Provide a seamless experience that consistently delivers on a unique brand promise.
Turn historic and real-time information into actionable insights to inform decisions across the organization – from personalized promotions and pricing to tailored assortment and supply chains.
More competition means less room for inefficiency. Retailers must maximize value from every resource to increase revenue, protect profits and overhead through to take advantage of new business opportunities.
Geo-location Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or ‘Bluetooth Marketing’ has exploded in popularity with the adoption of new Beacon technologies. Beacons are essentially ‘GPS for indoors’, which allow for personalized, micro-location –based notifications and alerts. For Retail, early adopters have used their iBeacons to communicate with smartphones in their stores by sending notifications with news, information and promotions.
NFC Near field communication is a technology that specifies a set of radio frequencies used by two devices in close proximity to exchange files and data. Retailers should expect to see a spike in demand to use their phones as payment. Other use cases include… if an NFC tag is attached to a poster, an NFC smartphone can "tap" the tag to access the information stored there. The phone might display a map to a store, product information, and even a link to a "buy page". Or for grocery, a shopper can touch their phone to a food package and instantly see its ingredients and nutrition information.
Wearable Tech Wearables are quickly extending beyond tech companies and fitness brands. Fashion houses are sizing up the market and exploring ways to create wearables for a new breed of shopper. Wearables rang up $475 million in sales during the last 12 months, according to the NPD Group, and awareness is growing fast: 52 percent of consumers said they had heard of wearable technology devices as of January. Top fashion brands have said they have a shared vision to “accelerate wearable technology innovation and create products that both enhance peoples' lives and are desirable to wear”
Pop Up Stores as mobile technology continues to advance (mobile wallet, NFC, wearable tech), mobile businesses will evolve with it. For instance, aside from food trucks, expect to see more fashion trucks, flower trucks, and even hair salon trucks. Pop-up stores, usually reserved for apparel retailers, will diversify as well.
Curbside wants to become the go-to solution for same-day pickup from local stores. That is, it’s combining the convenience of mobile ordering with the option to pickup the items from the store, without having to leave the comfort of your car.
Mobile-ordering for curbside pick up requires an extensive amount of big data capabilities to manage real-time availability, pricing, and location-based mobile tech
Social Assortments Retailers are currently using social sites to monitor feedback and connect with customers, but they will take a step further and use social media to influence product displays/assortments, and marketing campaigns. Nordstrom for example, has started using Pinterest to decide which products to display in their stores. According to Business Insider, “popular items on Pinterest will be displayed with a red tag identifying them as popular in the women's shoe and handbag departments of a major retailer.”
User-Generated Content 60M photos are shared on Instagram everyday. Those images are often shared on Facebook and pinned on Pinterest. This has created an enormous library of digital content that Retailers can potentially leverage to compliment their stock photography or use for merchandise which does not have an image online.
59% of retailers said that a lack of consumer insight was their top data related pain point
Top three reasons why retailers use big data
#1 analyzing consumer data
#2 bringing together different data sources
#3 improving personalization
Smarter Shopping Experience: Retailers that deliver a smarter shopping experience interact with consumers in ways that provide each of them with a timely, relevant and personalized experience. IBM helps retailers collect, secure and analyze big data generated through mobile, social and the Internet of Things, allowing them to get to know each customer as an individual in context. Using all the information that’s available— from new sources, structured and unstructured, inside and outside the organization—it becomes possible to not only understand an individual’s history but also perceive each person’s interests and current lifestyle needs and wants.
Merchandising & Supply Networks: While merchandising is often viewed as an art, new technologies can now add science to these processes. By quickly identifying shifting trends, consumer sentiments and selling opportunities, buyers can make the best choices so as to maximize their return on inventory and avoid markdowns. If you take into account targeted consumers, you can develop tailored and differentiated assortments - by location or channel - that achieve the highest sales, margin and customer satisfaction. IBM helps retailers to accurately anticipate customer needs and align a compelling offering of products, prices, and promotions. IBM also helps retailers in real-time inventory visibility to optimize planning and fulfillment processes, so as to create a supply network that can provide dependable delivery against changing demand, while also maximizing inventory productivity and profitability.
Smarter Operations: Smarter operations encompasses a range of improvements that are designed to streamline back-office processes; take advantage of reduced-cost delivery models; optimize people, process and system capabilities at the store and enterprise level; protect the business in the face of fast-evolving threats; and establish much better visibility into organizational performance.