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Swagg

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Swagg

I’m not sure how I missed this one.  Thanks to Alan Taetle for pointing it out to me.   I remember seeing their booth at NRF, but it just looked like a bunch of tchotchke’s with an attitude.  Needless to say, I missed this for my top 10 list, but in retrospect this likely would have gotten a top spot.

We’ve been hearing about digital wallets for a long time now.  At CES last week, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs announced Swagg.

According to the PDF I found at Pixelatedeek.com,  “Swagg enables smart, efficient and rewarding transactions on the go.  Swagg allows users to purchase, share and exchange gift cards, receive and redeem offers, view loyalty card points or balances, share content and more – straight from the convenience of a mobile device.”

According to an article by Mike Freeman of the Union tribune, Paul Jacobs (Qualcomm’s CEO) said the mobile-gift-card portion of the Swagg platform should be available before the next holiday season.

There are quite a number of new players in the mobile payments space – Square, Mophie, FaceCash and more traditional players like VivoTech and Verifone.  Swagg is a big play, but Qualcomm is a great company (as is their Atlanta-based subsidiary driving this – Firethorn) with massive resources and global reach.

Swagg has the potential to significantly impact the customer experience as it relates to loyalty and gift cards making them both mobile and social.  Definitely one to watch.

There’s not much on the website yet, but here’s a slick video for your enjoyment.


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NRF #10

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Recently, I did a post listing the top 10 things that caught my eye at NRF.  Here is more detail on number 10– Ikan.

Ikan is provides a scanner and thin web device designed for the kitchen.  The idea is to scan items as you discard them to create your list which can be sent to a grocer, or accessed for your own use on the web.

On the web site, you can see the current model, but at NRF they were showing the next version which runs Android, allowing more interactive web access.  Here is a short video of the demo I received at NRF.

The benefits for customers would be an easier way to create and maintain your list based on usage.  This in addition to the web and application access demonstrated in the video.  For retailers and manufacturers, there would be benefit in knowing about usage patterns (privacy policy permitting of course) prior to purchase.  The retailer could also provide relevant offers for alternative products based on timing, a map through the store to pick up your items, etc.

Ikan has a number of challenges.  First, the device itself sells for $399.  That’s expensive for a consumer device.  While it can access various applications and websites, I’d rather have a laptop or netbook to do those things.  If I really want the scanner, there are options from around $I79.

Unfortunately for ikan, there is a even better option which is to use applications that allow barcode reading from my smartphone.   For $0.99, I can buy something like GroceryIQ for my iPhone.  The integrated scanning capability (using RedLaser from Occipital) works great and it’s integrated right into the application allowing me to create my list.

What does this mean for Ikan?  Unfortunately, as much as I liked the Ikan guys, I personally wouldn’t shell out $399 for the integrated device when I can have a laptop for the same amount.  Grocery IQ did a great job of scanning and creating my list.

What does this mean for grocery retailers?  Apps like GroceryIQ are going to some degree control the customer and the customer experience if you let them.   It’s time for grocery retailers to create their own mobile apps that add value to the customer in a way that differentiates the brand.

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NRF Top 10

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

NRF10Thank goodness AT&T was down all during NRF 2010.  It allowed me to focus on walking the floor without the distraction of various business associates trying to get in touch with me.  :-)

While I can’t say I didn’t miss something, I was able to cover the entire floor.  Here are the top 10 things I found of interest as it relates to technology which impacts the customer experience.

Very few of these will have a massive impact in the short run.  Some may not even be at NRF next year.  However, I believe they point towards the future of retail technology.  I will follow up with a blog post on each outlining what I believe to be their benefits as well as challenges they will have in achieving mainstream retail adoption.

  1. Intel/Microsoft Digital Display
  2. Fashionista by Rich Relevance
  3. IBM/Cisco Mobile Concierge
  4. Modiv
  5. IBM Social Media Data Mining
  6. Lightspeed by Xsilva
  7. Transaction Tree*
  8. Identity Mine Retail Map
  9. FaceCash
  10. Ikan

*full disclosure – I am not an investor, but I have been an informal advisor to Transaction Tree.  And I just happen to like them.

Update – after originally posting this, I learned that I missed Swagg, which would definitely have made the list.   More on them in a follow up post.

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Posted in Customer Experience, Retail, Technology | 1 Comment »

Mobile in Retail?

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Just saw this posted at the Global Retail Executive Council blog.  This could explain the confusion I expressed in my previous post.

mobile poll

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Mobile, Social Media and the Customer Experience

Friday, January 8th, 2010

iStock_000007369128XSmallJoe Skorupa, Editor-in-Chief, RIS News recently wrote a blog post entitled “Fearless Retail Predictions: Part 2.”  He interviewed a strong panel of industry analysts, technology vendors and one retailer to come up with a list of predictions for 2010.   The predictions were heavily slanted toward the use of mobile and social media technologies. 

However, when you juxtapose these predictions with a recent comment from the RIS/IHL Group Store 2010 Store Systems Study, something is not lining up. 

“In this year’s study, we also asked how retailers use technology to enhance the customer experience. Should technology be used front and center as part of the experience or behind the scenes? Nearly half of the respondents (48%) answered: “We use technology to enable speed and execution, but it is largely invisible to consumers other than speed through checkout.” In other words, the customer experience in the store is not tied to technology.”

I’m confused because I believe that the power of mobile and social media technologies lies in just that – enhancing the customer experience.  This survey is directed heavily at IT personnel (63% of respondents).    Perhaps retail IT executives don’t see mobile and social media technologies as enhancing the customer experience.  Perhaps they are just not involved with how these technologies are being leveraged. 

Based on my experience with retail executives, these tools are being investigated mainly by the marketing department led by ad agencies looking for ways to capitalize on the changing media landscape.    Agencies are proposing mobile applications, couponing services, location-based services, social media campaigns and other creative ways of tapping into the social and mobile scene; all without much IT involvement. 

CIO’s need to get their arms around these marketing efforts – not to control them, but to help the organization understand how to more fully leverage these technologies;  integrating mobile into multi-channel and loyalty efforts, integrating social media into business intelligence efforts.    If left to outside forces, opportunities to leverage these technologies to differentiate the customer experience may be diminished or lost.  When these tools are integrated into the retailers’ infrastructure, they will truly become technology which enables a differentiated customer experience.

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Retail Sales Back from the Abyss

Monday, December 14th, 2009

The U.S. Census Bureau announced last week that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for November, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $352.1 billion, an increase of 1.3 percent from the previous month and 1.9 percent above November 2008.

Good news that we are finally showing positive year over year comps. Here’s a graph of monthly data going back to 1993.

Adj Monthly Retail Sales Nov 2009


Although, when you look at the adjusted totals through November of 2008, we are still down 7% year over year.  Total retail sales are below 2007 and 2006 levels as well.  We are just 1.4% above 2005 levels to this point in the year.

11 month retail sales totals 2005 to 2009


So, it looks like we are pulling back from the abyss, but we still have a ways to go to get back to the levels of 2006, 2007 and even 2008.

Retailers must differentiate to take market share and grow.  For many retail segments, the customer experience will be what separates the winners from the losers.

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Interview with Jack Dorsey about Square on CNBC

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Jack Dorsey on CNBC talking about Square.

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Mobile Internet and Retail – Part Two

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Pretty young woman using her mobile at a clothes storeThis is part two of a blog post regarding Mary Meeker’s 2009 Web 2.0 presentation and implications for retailers.  For me, there are six key takeaways:

1.  Your customers will increasingly carry massive computing power and, via the cloud, access to any information and services they want.  You need to make them value yours vs. some third party price comparison site.   Build and deploy valuable applications that support the customer through the buying cycle from search, to store, to purchase.

2.  Customers will expect Wi-Fi service at every retail location.  I know there are issues.  Provide it anyway.

3.  Location, location, location.  Not yours; your customers.  Knowing the customers location will enable entirely new ways of communicating and fostering a relationship with them.   Be careful.   You need to offer value for this information.   If you use this information to spam them, the opportunity for conversation will be lost for a very long time.

4.  Ready or not, devices like the iPhone are coming to the retail enterprise.  People are using them in their daily lives and will see the value of using them at work.  Security and other concerns need to be addressed, but departments and business units will push retail CIO’s to incorporate these tools sooner rather than later.

5.  The information kiosk is dead.  The customer is carrying the next generation kiosk with them.  Make this part of your mobile commerce strategy.

6.  As in Japan, mobile commerce will represent the fastest growing channel for multi-channel retailers.  I know; we’ve been talking about mobile commerce for a decade.  The iPhone changed everything.  If you don’t have a mobile commerce strategy.  You need to develop one – now.

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Augmented Reality as Key Retail Enabler

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

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I have found that very often retailers can lag other industries in terms of adoption of more operational technologies, but in terms of customer-facing technologies, which are increasingly powerful and prevalent, they will need to be leaders to differentiate and survive.

Nikki Baird, analyst at RSR Research, wrote a blog post recently entitled “Augmented Reality in Retail”.  In it, she comments:

“[Augmented reality is] closer than you think. And, just as online changed consumers’ expectations from retailers, new user interfaces will easily have the same impact, forcefully thrusting retailers once again to the forefront of consumer technology adoption. Whether they’re ready or not.”

This is clearly going on via the web and even the Sunday paper with companies like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. Increasingly, this technology will be used to differentiate the in-store experience in new, exciting, and innovative ways.

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Augmented Reality in Retail

Friday, October 30th, 2009

AR GirlI was reading a blog post by John Sviokla on the Harvard Business website asking, “How Will Augmented Reality Affect Your Business?” Since I’d been spending some time thinking about the specific applications to retail, I thought I’d take a shot at answering that question for the retail space.

In this post, I will show some general examples, some retail specific ones, and then talk about what I think this means for retail.

For those of you who are not familiar with the concept, the basic idea behind augmented reality is to visually merge virtual objects with real objects. The most common example is the first-down marker you see on televised football games. To get the juices flowing, below are some examples which have fueled my imagination with regards to the topic.

A marketing campaign done by Nike in Japan (warning – the audio is terrible).

A game created by Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD-Atlanta):

An industrial/operations example from BMW:

Here are some more retail-specific marketing examples:

And an example from Zugara:

Most of the above scenarios are enabled by a ‘tag’ – a visual symbol that starts the visualization. Here is a different example from a company called Layar which instead uses GPS and compass orientation to display virtual information over the live video feed from your camera.

I think the mobile aspect, adding the context of not only location but also the specific customer using the application, is significant. Using an AR shelf tag, one application might be to display different promotional offers to different customers based on their loyalty status or even time of day.

Thanks to Keith McGreggor, I had the good fortune recently to meet with Blair McIntyre, who heads up the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech. Brilliant guy. I appreciate his taking time to meet with me. While he pointed out that there are still limitations (camera quality, iPhone API issues), I’m convinced that we are at the front of a convergence between the mobile web and the real world.

The retail business against the current economic backdrop is about value, differentiation and growth by seizing market share. Augmented reality technology has the potential to transform the customer experience in fundamental ways that separate the winners from the losers. I also believe that while AR will be used first in marketing and customer facing applications, there are significant operational applications as well.

We are just starting up the hype curve now and it will be several years before we see the trough of despair and mainstream adoption, but depending in the overall value proposition of the retailer, AR technologies have the potential to change the game.

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