CREATING BLENDED RETAIL EXPERIENCES.
People Expect More. The Opportunity to give it to them is here.
Marketing integration. We have all said it, sold it or dreamed it. I wonder of the quest for integration is possible as brand experiences become less screen based and more integrated into the physical world.
What does integrated mean in this new world? With so much of these new experience powered by technology and new data we have never used before.
A simple example could be the transformation we see in retail. One of my favorite examples is the smart shopping bag by Twyst. The Twyst platform migrates the checkout process into the shopping bag creating a friction free personal experience. This intelligent bag is essentially a series of antennas that picks up on what's physically in the bag via RFID, where you are in the store (geo-location) and connects to an app on your smartphone. The smartphone sends what you are doing in the retail environment to a set of rules in the cloud (CRM) to determine what offer or content (content mgt) is displayed based on the scenario. The shopping bag is connected to an ecosystem of data sources that used to be delivered to people with things like email, e-commerce, display media and direct mail.
When I begin to imagine what consumers will expect from brands, I think marketing integration should focus more on data integration and training marketing teams on how to use data to design new ways to engage people in a networked environment where you might only own parts of the experience, but your data feeds another part.
Data driven design requires marketers to think about the human experience more than what's trending in social, purchase patterns or a/b testing. We need to create marketing experiences that build on today’s foundational data and also integrate time, location, biomarkers, and emotion based data to take advantage of the mixed reality people are living in today.
Tequila brand Patron launched a clever integration with Amazon Echo. To coincide with “National Tequila Day” people can ask Echo’s Alexa Voice Service for anything from trending cocktails to facts about tequila. This is an early and static example of creating branded experiences in a world that is non-screen driven, but helps us begin to imagine what's possible when we think beyond the screen.
As new types of data such as biomarkers become more accessible, you could easily see smart clothing reading sweat throughout the day to know what food you should eat for dinner to restore your bodies nutrients. This data would trigger a whole a set of activities, from proposing dinner options on your route home, to a grocery list which could be delivered to your house or a workout program that is optimized based on these markers.
It sounds crazy to think that marketing would need to be humanized, but we are entering an era where people expect more relevant experiences and the opportunity to do so is here, now. How ready is your team for this new reality?
