Increase Sales

Digital merchandising is leveraging the power of digital endpoints to merchandise your products– this means presenting your products for sale! The unit shouldn’t just look pretty – it should add value to your business. Any digital merchandising initiative should increase product sales. With digital merchandising you should expect a worthwhile return, and the ROI needs to justify the overall project cost.

Increase Brand Visibility

Digital merchandising initiatives employ technology to promote you and your brand as the hero in-store. Units show your brand’s colors, slogans, and relevant content. They give you another touch point to meet your consumers and make your brand known. Merchandising your product with a digital screen or kiosk unit can get you premier positioning in-store. Store personnel often want to place displays of this kind on end-caps or other areas that are easily accessible to customers. In this way, your brand can easily become the face of a particular in-store category.

Educate & Inform Customers of Product Information

Digital merchandising is a useful tool to educate and inform customers about a new product. When an entirely new product is introduced, consumers have no idea how to use it, what it’s for, or how it can make their lives better. Marketers bring useful and necessary information like product features and practical benefits to consumers through digital merchandising programs.

Typically, you would rely on a knowledgeable sales person to explain new or complex sets of product features, but in today’s marketplace, store personnel of that caliber are hard to find and often unreliable. Digital merchandising units can be implemented to fill the consumer’s need for information about complex products in-store. In the long run, having a product expert on hand (a digital merchandising unit) will persuade the retailer to have your product in-stock and may even eliminate another providers product from their offerings.

Before you get started, think your project through. Use the list above as a starting point.

Image : Amazon Web Services Blog

A few weeks ago, three of our developers made the short trek down to the Jacob Javits Center in New York to attend the Amazon Web Services Cloud for Start-ups & Developers Event. The event was held the night before AWS’s 2012 Summit kickoff.

Overall, the presentations were a little light on details and our team wished for a more in-depth look at the specific technical aspects of AWS Cloud. They wanted to see coding examples and gain a thorough explanation of how all the services work together. Our team did appreciate the candid presentations from AWS Customers: Adam Nelson from Yipit and Michael Young from News.me. They felt that the presentations revealed honestly how start-ups use AWS Cloud indicating both the benefits as well as some of the drawbacks and caveats.

AWS Cloud works to meet scaling, storage, and traffic needs of many startups. This dramatically reduces the costs and risks of investing in elaborate information architecture for prototyping and production – which is ideal for companies who are just starting out. “This information,” one of our developers said, “is something most developers are aware of. We would have liked to see more concrete examples. But, hey, it’s good to get out of the office sometimes!”

The display shows up to 60 square feet of content (pictures, videos, animations). See it in action below!

Video courtesy Kim Takal of Reality Pictures. The NY Auto Show has over 37 automotive brands exhibiting each year at the Jacob Javits Center during the month of April. For more information on how automotive brands are using interactive displays, download our white paper on the 2011 NY Auto Show.

See also:

NYC Auto Show: Interactive Technology at Play and on Display

ICT Data and Statistics Division estimates there are 5.9 billion mobile-cellular subscribers worldwide.⁴ Total US mobile subscribers number 234 million, in a survey conducted by comScore during the months of December 2011 – February 2012.⁵

Whether it’s through QR codes, SMS messages, mobile apps, or email, consumers are leveraging mobile technologies to connect with retailers and brands.⁶ Mobile couponing is one way consumers reach the brands they love. See more stats in the infographic below.

Infographic courtesy of Microsoft.

¹ “Are kiosks still relevant in a mobile world?” from kioskmarketplace.com.

² “CETW and rebuttal of sorts: Are kiosks relevant in mobile world?” from kioskmarketplace.com.

³ “The insider’s guide to mobile Web marketing in the US,” from mobiThiking.com.

⁴“The World in 2011, ICT Fact and Figures,” from itu.int.

⁵ “comScore Reports February 2012 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share,” from comScore.com.

⁶ “Social Networking On-The-Go: U.S. Mobile Social Media Audience Grows 37 Percent in the Past Year,” from comScore.com.

See also:

SoMoLo: Consumers’ Shopping Lifestyles Shift

Mobile Technology: Equipping Your Sales Teams

• Brian Solis, Principal of the Altimeter Group, author of “The End of Business as Usual”
• Brandon Berger, Worldwide Chief Digital Officer of Ogilvy & Mather

Thanks for visiting us! We made a lot of great connections. We’re looking forward to seeing you at CETW in New York.

If we didn’t meet you at the show, we’d still love to learn more about your unique story and how we can create value for you, your brand, and your customers. Reach out to us today.

Come visit us at booth #707 where we’ll be showcasing our unique solutions. We’d love to chat with you and create synergy between our offerings and your specific needs.

We’re looking forward to attending a few sessions from our peers like “How to Navigate the Complex Mobile Ecosystem” presented by the Digital Screenmedia Association Mobile Council.

See you at the show!

Apply Learnings

Throughout the deployment process, you’ll learn things that can make your project better. First, you prototype your kiosk solution, next you pilot it, and finally you roll-out multiple units. At each stage in the process, you will get greater insight into how things can run more smoothly and what can be improved.  Be sure to apply your learning to each subsequent stage of deployment.

Consider the Cost of Change Over Time

If you need to make a change with the unit, it’s better to make the change in an earlier stage of development. Any changes made after deployment or mid-stream in the production process will dramatically increase costs.

Plan Ahead & Reduce Worries

Create a thorough plan for connectivity, power, shipping/receiving, field services support, help desk and other logistics. Managing deployment of units with sophisticated electronic technology isn’t the same as managing a display/fixture campaign roll-out. There is a tendency in the field to rush the shipping of units. But, the overall goal is to have something in the field, installed and producing results.

Quality results are born from thoughtful and thorough planning. The more work you do up-front, the more sleep you’ll get, and the less cost you’ll incur. Think of kiosks like appliances; every unit in the field should be identical. Don’t operate kiosks like desktop environments in the field. Test everything! Leave nothing to chance.

Final Thoughts

Controlling costs and increasing unit “up time” are achieved by combining insight and experience with detailed process-oriented program management. Today’s low cost hardware, proven software, and remote management technologies create a viable opportunity for almost every brand in every retail environment to leverage the benefits of Digital Merchandising.

Understanding  SoMoLo consumer shopping behavior is a major interest of innovators who create applications for the retail context as well as retail workers themselves. Results of a Motorola Solutions Survey, indicate that “75% of retail associates and managers feel they provide a better in-store customer experience when equipped with the latest mobile technologies.”²

The latest statistics from a Pew research study reveal, “88% of all U.S. adults now own a cell phone and 46% of all American adults now use smartphones.”³ What are you doing to leverage SoMoLo opportunities that you already have in the hands of nearly 50% of Americans cell phone users?

For more details on SoMoLo, check out this detailed infographic from Commerce in Motion below!

via   Infographic courtesy of Commerce in Motion.

¹ “BIA/Kelsey Forecasts U.S. Local Digital Ad Revenues to Nearly Double to $42.5B by 2015 from $21.7B in 2010,” from biakelsey.com.

² “75 percent of Retail Associates Report Latest Mobile Technology Leads to Better Customer Experience, According to Motorola Solutions Survey,” reported in finance.yahoo.com.

³“Survey : Most US Cell Owners Have Smart Phones,” from FOX8.com.

See also:

Mobile Technology: Equipping Your Sales Teams

Holiday Season Shopping: eComm, Social Media & Mobile Prove Crucial Channels

Image: https://twitter.com/#!/DSExpo/media/grid
© DSE

The time has finally come. DSE 2012, “the world’s largest international trade show dedicated to digital signage, interactive technology, and Out-of-home networks,” is in full swing this week.

With the numbers confirmed today, the show’s international attendance is the largest it has ever been. Attendees include registrants from Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Columbia, Taiwan, South Korea, Russia, Australia, China and Korea.

Reality Interactive’s CEO, Craig Martin, will co-present the session, The Power of Interactive: From Drawing Crowds to Engaging Individuals, with Marcus Fischer from Space 150. If you’re there, check it out!

As usual, we’ll have a few bits of wisdom and some insights in response to the show, check back for more details.

Source: “DSE 2012 Attracts Largest International Audience in 9-Year History,” from digitalsignageconnection.com.

See also:
The Power of Interactive: From Drawing Crowds to Engaging Individuals

Engaging the Individual: The Impact of Daily Interactive Touch Points

Image: Engadget.com
© Phil Kimmelman & Associates

President Obama recently released a document that outlines plans to protect the privacy of Internet users. You can read the entire release or read our abridged version below, if you prefer not to read through all the legalese.

The president often makes regulatory recommendations to Congress. This one, in particular, seeks to help consumers keep their personal data safe while allowing technological innovation to continue. This is important news for consumers and technologists because it could call for some drastic changes in the way personal data is handled and managed.

Who are the players?

• Consumers (You!)
• Commerce Department National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA)
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
• Congress
• Internet companies like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft,  AOL, etc. (Them!)

What are the goals?

• Protect consumer privacy and assure the ability of continued innovation by implementing flexible privacy rules that can keep up with innovation
• Create the groundwork for interoperability between the U.S. data privacy framework and trading partners (technology systems)
• Require internet companies and online advertising networks to use ‘Do Not Track’ technology

What is being proposed?

• Consumers ability to exercise control over what information companies collect about them  and how that personal data is used
• Provide reasonable limits on what personal data companies can collect and retain
• Establish standards on how personal information is secured and handled
• Guidelines for accessibility to a company’s privacy & security practices
• Ensure that companies who collect, use, and disclose personal data do it in ways that are consistent with the context in which the data is provided
• Identify who is accountable for the use or misuse of an individual’s personal data
• Ability for consumers to review, modify or remove the data that has been collected

We all should be considering how companies (and our government) will respect our privacy online. I plan to provide a follow up post on some additional ideas which should be included in the legislation. Meanwhile, take a look at the WebProNews’ video covering the Privacy Bill of Rights below.