Retail Matters - Digital Innovation at Retail, Q1 2008

The Store - Lastest thinking on Retail Matters

Issue VII - March 2008
Digital Innovation at Retail

Welcome to Retail Matters - WPP's retail newsletter from The Store!

This issue focuses on innovation at retail, with an emphasis on shopper facing technology and multichannel developments. At our most recent conference in Santa Monica, we looked at In-store media, mobile technology and a host of other innovations to reach the shop floor. We also covered how the on-line communities and consumer advocacy is reshaping the media framework. The articles and papers below represent some of the session themes and more.

Please feel free to pass this along to your colleagues and be sure to visit The Store's new blog thestore.typepad.com

Gwen Morrison, The Store
gmorrison@wpp.com

Retail Marketing and the Internet
By Jenna Woodul, LiveWorld

The movement of brand building from mass marketing to social marketing requires new approaches and different goals. Instead of acquiring the customer, the aim becomes starting a conversation with (and maximizing the value of) that customer over time. Instead of the goal being mass impressions, it's to go deeper with fewer people and create customer evangelists. Market share becomes share of customer lifetime; share of customer voice and communication of improved service offerings takes on the added dimension of enhanced customer relationship.

Clearly a new marketing approach is critical. To support their sophisticated graphical and text presentation of messages and images, retailers need to set up a context for dialogue with the customer - extending brand essence and personality, but also bridging the distance between seller and customer. Moreover, retailers need to understand that such a dialogue is not the company's vehicle for communication, but merely an open channel in which company voice is but one of many. Progressive companies that participate respectfully in the conversation will find that their brand personalities become more personal, matching the capability of and fulfilling the expectation of the new medium.

The Path to Optimizing Retail Digital Media: Walk In the Shopper's Shoes
By Gwen Morrison, The Store

Over the past ten years, in-store media technology has become better, cheaper, and more compelling. Combine this with increasingly fragmented traditional media and there appears to be a strong business model. With roll-outs reaching consumers in numbers that compare to broadcast media, retail became the new media frontier. But despite the developments, the majority of in-store networks have struggled to meet their targets and deliver real value for the shopper.

Read more about 'The Path to Optimizing Retail Digital Media'...

Channel Red at Target US

In-store Will Become the Central Theatre for Mobile Phone Communication
By Jim Taylor, Mediaedge:cia

There's no doubt that in the next decade, the mobile phone will open up many new and exciting communication opportunities in the world around us. But in my view it is in-store, in the retail environment itself, that the mobile phone will have the most profound effect. Let me explain... Today, in-store communication is a repressed child. Retailers, on the whole, believe that there are many other factors which influence shopper behaviour more than communication - service levels, environment, stock levels, shopper value perception, and so on.
	They remain unconvinced that communications can do much more than simply incentivizing shoppers through promotional messaging. For this reason, retailers today have stripped away a lot of the historical 'cardboard' in the interest of cleaning up the aisles for shoppers and making the shopping trip easier. They're also reactive, not pro-active. They say 'no' to manufacturer communication initiatives, often as a matter of course, without necessarily having good reasons or having a reference point on how communication can and should be used differently, around different
parts of the store, for different types of categories, and for different share brands within a category. So right now in most markets we're now in a catch-22. Retailers are reactive and unconvinced; and there's a lack of high impact communication formats to break the deadlock - which is where the opportunity for the mobile phone comes in.

Interactivity
By Simon Robinson, AKA.tv

Interactive digital signage represents a massive shift in the digital signage industry, one that is likely to increase its commercial potential exponentially and one that will allow the screen to become an information tool to the consumer, not an obtrusive piece of unwanted furniture. Traditional signage takes a single message and disseminates it to as many parties as possible; interactive signage takes a dynamic message and tailors it to one specific audience member.

"Interactive communications allows the retailer to target their messages to a specific time, place and customer," said Wayne Ruttle, vice president of sales for ADFLOW Networks. "It's not just a static one-message-fits-all anymore. Now you can talk to customers on a one-to-one basis, and tailor that message to a particular buying pattern, demographic and time."

And interactivity gives the customer a voice and a means to communicate back to the retailer. "Being able to interact really gets the customer involved. And when that customer is exposed to a message personally customized to what they're looking for, when they're looking for it, the odds of making the sale increase dramatically."

YDreams New Toyota
Showroom, Lisbon