Multi-Channel Commerce & Retailing

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit, even looking at the data embedded in the jpeg, I can’t figure out where I took this thing. I think it was somewhere in central TX where I live.

Which I’d like to say got me thinking about Multi-Channel Commerce, but instead it made me remember a recent article I read on Eye-Fi, which brings interesting value-add technologies to plain ol’ SD cards. They now offer the Eye-Fi Explore card that, by triangulating wi-fi signals which the company has meticulously mapped (read some of the articles at http://www.eye.fi/news/reviews-awards/ to get a better idea of how this works than I can present here), imprints every photo with the approximate location at which it was taken. THAT would allow me to figure out where I found E Commerce street!

And THAT got me thinking about multi-channel commerce in a whole new way. Perhaps our traditional channel paradigm needs to change from the old medium-based framework of bricks & mortar, online, direct, etc. to a different frame of reference.

The Eye-Fi card, of course, got me thinking that location would be one component of this new framework…but as we all know, a one-dimensional framework is somewhat unappealing. So I had to find other components. If this new paradigm can be summarized as a graph (as all good paradigms can), what are its axes?

I have a notion that at least one of them is somehow related to proximity, or perhaps intimacy, yielding two axes:

1. Location: as technology improves, marketers gain better and better information about where you are, which they can then use to target you by the most appropriate channel based on this knowledge.
2. Intimacy: this could be a big axis, or several. I’m using “Intimacy” to indicate a category that contains some superset of:
1. What is the time: the timing of the interaction is relevant on every conceivable level: the year, the season, the month, week, day, hour, minute.
2. What you are doing: are you on a lunch break from work? Driving to the country for a weekend with the family? In an unfamiliar location?
3. Who you are: what are your demographics? Health concerns? Hobbies? Profession? Interests? Tastes? Pulse/blood pressure/other easy-to-measure-and-transmit vital stats at this particular moment?
4. How well do we know you: how much data on the above points (or any others related to intimacy) do we have? How about location data? How reliable is all of this?

As technology improves, it’s inevitable that marketers and sellers will get better and better information about their prospects’ and customers’ intimacy axis as well. As the accuracy of this information improves, and the technology delivering it becomes more ubiquitous, maybe we’ll finally see the long-predicted debut of the location-dependent lunchtime fast-food SMS coupon.

But I’d like to ask you to help me think outside the box about how the combination of location and intimacy—together with their lower-level facilitating technologies, like wi-fi, wi-max, GPS, SMS/MMS, digital imaging, character recognition, customer data management, artificial intelligence, and increasingly robust mobile web access devices—will impact our thinking about channels going forward. Beside the $.50 off hamburger coupons that might pop up as you stroll past a MacDonald’s at noon, what else should we look forward to? Some thought starters:

-         Product, price, placement, and promotion—besides the hamburger coupon, how can location and intimacy knowledge be leveraged to improve the classic 4Ps? If I as a marketer know where you are and something about what your tastes are, how does that influence the products I promote to you and how I position them?

-         Data input—Remember, in addition to facilitating voice and text communication, most cellphones now contain cameras and MMS capability. How can this feature be used to drive interactivity between marketer and buyer? Think about technologies like OCR, barcode recognition, and automated language  translation.

-         Social networking—how might marketers use location awareness, imaging/sms, mobile data input/send capabilities, and ubiquitous internet connectivity to encourage social networks in a way that both improves the customer experience and increases the bottom line?

-         Ethics—on a recent trip to the UK, my mobile provider figured out that I was there and SMS’d me a message about my roaming rates. I don’t remember opting in for this kind of message, but I was happy to receive it. What kinds of communications, under what kinds of circumstances, is it ethical for a marketer to push (unsolicited) to a shopper by leveraging the technologies we’re discussing?

-         Feasibility—From a technology standpoint, how feasible are these Big Ideas? How long will we have to wait for the software and hardware necessary to realize them?

I’d love to hear your feedback—especially if you have axes to add to (or grind into:^) the framework!