!enilnO - The Online Inverse.
For the last decade and a half, we as technology consultants have been spending a lot of time and energy trying to get a bulk of the offline world online. From processes, paperwork, stores, directories to design, commerce, finance and everything that comes in between. And our efforts have borne us some really good fruits. Thanks to innovation in technology, the world is a whole lot better place today. Technology has eliminated long queues from banks, given us a chance to share our opinions about products and services and created a new world, cross border citizen out of all of us.
But I cannot help but think that all this while we have only been focusing on getting more and more of our offline world, online and have somehow ignored the offline space along the way. Our experience has got us to build a wonderful world online and perhaps its time for us to collect choicest goodies from the online world and get them to the offline stores. Let’s try to crystal gaze and see what could happen, particularly in the retail space, if we turn our Online! World around and start thinking about !enilnO
The Fish Market Days
Before I start talking about the possibilities that lay ahead of us, it might be a good idea to set some context of old style retailing, whose flavour can be seen in today’s fish or flea markets. When compared to large retail stores, these markets operate in a very different mode, particularly the way they market their products. If you are a regular at any old world market, your hawkers would know you by name. A courtesy greeting will welcome you as soon as you approach them. Most vendors would also know what you usually buy and how much. As a regular, most people like and avail special discounts on their orders.
Even if you are a not a regular, the way the hawkers try to sell you stuff is quite different. Some would start yelling out special offers and prices as they see people approaching. Some experienced hawkers can also make out what products you would be interested in, depending on what you are carrying in your shopping bags and try to make personalized offers.
So, what’s the Big Deal?
None of the Fish market selling is rocket science. We have built very superior systems and websites which can make personalized offers to the customers based on their demographic and purchase history. On some advanced eStores, no two users see the same offers, or even the same search results. Everything is personalized online; we have really cracked this space wide open. But what about the offline world?
Think about your favourite super store for a minute and you’ll realize what I am trying to convey. When a customer goes to HisFavouritySuperStore.com, he is greeted with personalized offers, personalized recommendations, he is able to share opinions and reviews about products and do a lot many interesting things.
Now, when the same customer goes to HisFavouritySuperStore, the experience becomes pathetically trivial! Today Store shoppers are not even greeted by a personalized greeting. Personalized offers and recommendation sounds way too futuristic for now. A regular customer may get a personalized greeting when he approaches the till, but for the other 95% of the time when he is roaming in the store, he is totally on his own.
Some stores try to get around this problem by sending personalized coupons through snail mail. That does work to some extent, but is that the best that we can do? I believe we have the technology in place today to convert each and every store shelf into a fish market hawker. With a dash of !enilnO thinking, the physical stores can bring a big pie of the online goodness to the brick and mortar world.
Really!!? But, How?
The new world store scenario would have to rely on the personal assistant that they send shopping with every customer in today’s world. The difference is that in the new world, this assistant will do a lot more than just carrying your groceries for you. Yes, I am referring to the erstwhile shopping cart. What we could do is mount every shopping cart with a medium screen display device, the size of your in-dash GPS system with the ability to exchange information with numerous sensors placed throughout the store, in different aisles.
As the customer enters the store and picks up the trolley, he can activate the personal shopping assistant by swiping his club card. Now, as this customer navigates from one aisle to another, sensors placed on these aisles will tell the trolley its present location in the store taxonomy. With a quick exchange of bytes with the central server, the shopping cart can start making personalized offers to the customer based on his past purchase history.
Wait, there’s more! Ever had a customer pick up a new product and wondering if they should give it a try? With a few touches on our new device, customers will be able to access product reviews and ratings with other users and take the unpredictability and guesswork out of their shopping experience.
A shopper’s life can be made so much simple if he does not need to memorize the list of all the products that he needs to buy. In this new world, the shoppers can go to the store’s online website, login using their club card, create a shopping list online, save and logoff. Now, when the pop in to the store and activate our new shopping cart by swiping their club card, their shopping list will be downloaded to the cart’s display device. More creative stores can also map the shopping list to the store’s layout map, telling the shopper where all the items on his shopping list are placed. Voila! The added plus is that since the cart already knows what the customer is going to buy, it can utilize this option for an effective cross and up sell.
Remember those shoppers scrambling from one aisle to another, with a shopping list and pen in their hand? So, 2008-ish!
What are we waiting for?
Your guess is as good as mine! The idea outlined in this post can be implemented with the technology that we have at our hand today. It is very conceivable and does not involve any abracadabra. What seems to be missing from the equation are a few creative stores and technologists who can imagine turning Online! Around 180 degrees to !enilnO.
Comments
Hi Anil,
Great post! The idea highlighted in your post have close resemblence to 'ShoppingTrip360' that Infosys launched last year. The only difference being that your viewpoint is more customer centric.
Future retailing would shape as more of a mix of both Online and enilnO just as banking space is shaping today.
Posted by: Krishna Sanganeria | March 1, 2009 08:29 PM
What you said is interesting and stimulating but, as a customer who buys both on-line and at shops or market, I perceive the two worlds in a very different way, especially if we talk about food. I guess that we need to distinguish between people that regularly buy on-line and also go offline and people who only buy in the brick and mortar shops because, this is the only shopping experience they are able to conceive (my mother, for instance, or people that are “unable” to buy online). For them, shopping is 70% of the time a chore so any help to speed the process up is fine and welcomed. To me, who consider the shop-offline as an enjoyable experience, a diving into the magic world of colour and smell, where the relation with the food awakens old “infantile” memories, the idea of using a card, a mobile or any other electronic device to speed my process or being flooded by promotions or wine suggestions, is as unpleasant as cutting a nice piece of Spanish ham with machine, eating a camembert “au lait pasteurisé” or touching frozen bakery products. I understand, any way, that food and non-food are two different worlds.
My vision may be wrong, but technology needs to make our experiences more enjoyable and trying to reproduce or mimic the on-line experience might not be always the right choice.
Posted by: Mario | March 13, 2009 04:23 PM
Hi Amit,
This is an excellent idea. I am just wondering if hawker market has ever worked in the same way in the western world.
In EU sharing so much information on the club card will be taken as a privacy issue.
I work in the field of web analytics and saving any information on the cookie becomes a big legal issue for my clients.
Posted by: Mangesh | March 24, 2009 11:41 AM
Hi Anil,
This is a great idea, suggest you take a look at the following presentation: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html at TED.com. It is kind of supportive of your thoughts on the topic.
Posted by: Rajat Garg | April 7, 2009 03:47 AM
It is a big issue in EU and fast approaching US too. The field of web analytics is quite at risk for many companies since it may well happen in the future that you need to request a customer/visitor permission prior to dropping a cookie. Nightmare for web analytics and marketers (as well as people who go by their Omniture stats for understanding visitor trends!)
Posted by: Thomas | April 9, 2009 07:59 PM
Hello Amit, Nice post. Nicely conveyed in the form of a story. The idea is already being implemented by some western supermarkets prime example being METRO group. In fact they have not only made the shopping cart personalized to the customer but have also personalized digital bill-boards so that when customers pass through it, ads relevant to the customer are delivered. In fact one can use their phones also to scan an item and find out the price and any specific offers on them. And lastly the customer’s whole basket or trolley is scanned quickly without the need to unload it. Like you mentioned it is upto some creative stores to kick start the whole process.
Posted by: Sathyaraj | June 3, 2009 04:11 AM
Hi Amit,
Nice article and I agree with your viewpoint of making Offline shopping experience personalized. Just to point out the model for launching Subhiksha stores was along the same lines. The idea was to launch more stores and the differentiation from local stores being the low cost and from supermarkets being the accessibility and services like free home delivery (more personalized service). There was a time when more than 100 stores were opened /month! I guess due to lack of inventory tracking/lack of basic IT involvement led to huge issues like pilferage which was very difficult to track and ultimately led to the fall of Subhiksha (apart from financial mess it got into)
As for personalization many IT organizations including TCS/Infosys already have a solution. Infosys has the 'Shopping Trip360' while TCS has a solution built in its 'Innovation Lab' in Chennai. In fact, it's a mini store and you can simulate the exact features you have mentioned!
Posted by: sandeep | July 29, 2009 06:01 AM