Digital world impacts retail consumer shopping.

This Digital World is impacting the ways we interact, the way we market, the way we communicate, the way we buy, the way we search, and so much more.  See how the digital worlds have invaded point of sale and the direct to consumer retail sales environment. 

 

This Digital World – Digital Signage Displays in Every Shopping Aisle

When shop­ping in a store, I often find myself liken­ing the pur­suit of find­ing exactly what I want to buy as a walk through a maze. I have only signs, other shop­pers, and my smart­phone to guide me. At times, stumped, I won­der how much harder this jour­ney to locate the item I want could be. Frus­trated, I ask myself, could this store make the maze any harder than it already is?

Can Digital technologies and the tools in this new digital world allow me to enhance this experience?

Imag­ine if, in the future, the shop­ping maze remains, but when you walk by a sec­tion of a store, the walls change. Not in a threat­en­ing sense, putting you in even more dire straits, but com­ing to your res­cue. On one wall, a dig­i­tal sig­nage dis­play wel­comes and greets you. It imme­di­ately rec­og­nizes you and knows what you have bought in the past. It then asks if you need help pur­chas­ing those same items or nav­i­gat­ing new ones.

Once you respond to the dis­play, it offers per­son­al­ized rec­om­men­da­tions and guides you to the items you’re look­ing for. It also reminds you of the offers you’ve earned from your past pur­chases. No longer per­plexed, you even­tu­ally leave the maze, sur­pris­ingly buy­ing more than you had come for! Thank­fully, you avoided hav­ing to accost ran­dom strangers in the store to find your way. And over­all, you rejoice at hav­ing had a won­der­ful shop­ping experience—finding what you wanted quickly, eas­ily, and self-sufficiently.

Nowa­days, as the price points for hard­ware dis­plays con­tinue to ebb, more stores will likely use dig­i­tal sig­nage dis­plays to engage cus­tomers in per­son­al­ized ways. The abil­ity to cus­tomize mes­sages to cus­tomers any­where in a store at any time of the day is pow­er­ful. For exam­ple, a gro­cery store could tar­get par­ents of small chil­dren as they walk through cer­tain aisles and send them per­son­al­ized offers based on the most immi­nent mealtime.

In addi­tion to get­ting per­son­al­ized offers and guid­ance around the store, cus­tomers will ben­e­fit by feel­ing not only like an impor­tant and remem­bered cus­tomer but also con­nected and engaged with the retailer. When they feel pos­i­tively about their rela­tion­ship with the brand, cus­tomers are likely to be emo­tion­ally drawn to keep com­ing back to the store.

As soon as I get to where my prod­uct cat­e­gory is within the store, either on my own accord or through some way-finding dig­i­tal dis­plays, the next chal­lenge is choos­ing a spe­cific prod­uct within that cat­e­gory. We’ve all found our­selves stand­ing in front of an assort­ment of hik­ing shoes, snow­boards, golf clubs, beard trim­mers (okay, maybe this is more mine), or even cars and won­der­ing, “What’s the dif­fer­ence between this one and that one?” or “Why is this one so much more than that one?”

The tra­di­tional approach is for store asso­ciates to help cus­tomers deter­mine which prod­uct is right for their needs. Yet, I think we can all appre­ci­ate that often we don’t want to engage with a sales­per­son and so we shoo them off with a polite “just brows­ing” response. In real­ity, how­ever, we’re strug­gling to under­stand the prod­uct cat­e­gory in front of us. Now, with a smart­phone in our pocket, we can begin to resolve some of our ques­tions, and, if the retailer is doing its part, there may even be an app for this.

Imag­ine how much richer and more com­pelling this expe­ri­ence could be with a large screen that lets me dis­cover and learn more about the cat­e­gory and which prod­uct is right for me. If you attended the recent Adobe Sum­mit, you may have seen a demon­stra­tion pow­ered by the Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud. We can not only present the con­tent on the dis­play, but also per­son­al­ize it to the cus­tomers in front of the dis­play and mea­sure their engagement.

Some national restau­rant chains are exper­i­ment­ing with dig­i­tal sig­nage dis­plays. Pizza Hut, for exam­ple, has made the dig­i­tal sig­nage dis­play a cen­tral part of its inter­ac­tive din­ing tables. From the moment they sit down, cus­tomers can design and order their piz­zas from their table­tops and then play games until their orders are ready.

Even menu boards in restau­rants can become dig­i­tal and can poten­tially upsell cus­tomers while they make a deci­sion. These dig­i­tal menu boards can be changed to reflect the time of day using the point-of-sale sys­tem or a mobile appli­ca­tion. In the UK, McDon­alds has been suc­cess­fully test­ing customer-facing dig­i­tal sig­nage solu­tions, find­ing that these dis­plays have lifted sales by as much as 11 per­cent on some items and have led to higher trans­ac­tion amounts.

Large, sprawl­ing spaces—such as air­ports, col­lege cam­puses, and malls—could use dig­i­tal sig­nage dis­plays to guide vis­i­tors in the right direc­tion. At the air­port, for exam­ple, tap­ping on a dis­play could pro­duce maps, coupons, restau­rant menus, real-time flight sta­tus, board­ing times, delays, and gate changes. Sapi­ent Engaged­Trav­eler, a dis­play tech­nol­ogy built with Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ager soft­ware, has seen more than 35,000 taps a week dur­ing its pilot at Minneapolis-St. Paul Air­port. This pro­vides a strik­ing exam­ple of what dig­i­tal sig­nage dis­plays can do for large sprawl­ing spaces.

We’re not too far from the day when dig­i­tal sig­nage dis­plays will per­vade most of our phys­i­cal spaces, trans­form­ing the real world into a more dig­i­tal one. One thing is for cer­tain: Hav­ing dig­i­tal sig­nage dis­plays at every cor­ner will make nav­i­gat­ing real-life mazes much more interesting.

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1 Comments to “Digital world impacts retail consumer shopping.”

  1. Anonymous says:

    My friend
    This post is so helpful,it give me much help,thanks!

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