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Will consumers opt-in for the 'store of the future?'

June 22, 2012 by Cherryh Cansler — Editor, FastCasual.com

Motorola Solutions recently launched a variety of solutions to help retailers deliver what it calls the "store of the future." Many of the company's solutions are designed around shoppers' reliance on their smartphones and how they always want to stay connected. For example, since some retailers are now setting up W-Fi for customer use, Motorola is offering solutions that also tap into that Internet connection. The company's Proximity Awareness and Analytics solution uses data from a retailer's WLAN network to detect mobile devices, which shows them where in the store customers and employees are in real-time, Tom Bianculli, Motorola's senior director of CTO emerging business office, told me Wednesday at the company's show-and-tell day New York City.

This technology sounds like a no-brainer; why wouldn't retailers want to know what aisles customers are spending the most time in and which employee is closest to a shopper wanting help at the jewelry counter? It's a marketing gold mine.

But here's the catch: Retailers can have all the fancy solutions in the world but still get no data if they can't get customers to opt in. I sat down with Bianculli to discuss this conundrum.

CB: How do retailers get customers to opt in?

TB: That's a good question, but take, for example, the tablet. It's been around a long time, but it's only in the last couple of years that the experience that people require in order to get the adoption has gotten to the point where it's sort of hit the tipping point. It's matured to the point where the experience is so compelling that you need to have the device.

I think that it's a similar kind of situation with this opt-in. The experience has to be so beneficial that it's a need-to-have thing, and that's in the process of being figured out. 'What am I willing to trade off privacy wise for convenience? What kind of service are you able to provide me?' I think that's where some of these elements that will be required to get the opt-ins are just now getting addressed. For instance, I (a customer) looked at certain items on the e-commerce site, and when I walk into the store, the store associate knows I'm there and knows what I had been looking at and can start to provide better service."

CB: And that's all based on the customer opting into a loyalty program?

TB: Right, Your phone has an ID called a MAC address that connects to the server. And you're logged in on the e-commerce site, taking that experience or your basket of goods that's on the e-commerce site, bringing that with you into the physical store and then having someone be able to assist you in the sale as soon as you walk into the store. That'll start to drive the adoption because it's as much about the benefit to the consumer as it is to the retailer.

CB: For a retailer to be able to use these new solutions, will the consumers have to download the store's app? For example, will I, as the consumer, have to download Target's app, Walmart's app, Home Depot's app -- everyone's app?

TB: That's a good question, and the answer right now is more or less, yes. But what you are going to see start to happen is that there will be a set of core services available in the store for which we'll be providing APIs. For the developer community, we'll be able to write to those APIs, the store will be able to write to those APIs. We will get to the scenario as long as the retailers agree that the best app wins. And then you could see those APIs become standard and you could have one app across retail.

CB: If the apps become standard, how will retailers differentiate themselves?

TB:This is vision or future casting a little bit, but folks are going to realize it's not the application that's the difference. It's the content. What we're getting at is that if I could have one application that I could use everywhere -- again that's back to adoption -- I don't have a hundred swipes I need to do on my phone to get to the app for this store, or do I have it installed for this store? It just works when I get there, so think about location-based services meeting social networking meeting in-store server functionality. In other words, there's a set of services that I can connect to once inside the store that the app can discover. If you think about all that coming together you can start to imagine a single experience running across multiple retailers, but each retailer can still distinguish itself with its content.

The example I give is when the TV first was first invented if every broadcasting channel said you could only watch our channel on our TV. That's how it started when RCA started NBC, but pretty soon they realized that maybe it was better if they let other people make TVS and they just sell the content.

About Cherryh Cansler

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Cherryh Cansler is VP of Events for Networld Media Group and publisher of FastCasual.com. She has been covering the restaurant industry since 2012. Her byline has appeared in Forbes, The Kansas City Star and American Fitness magazine, among many others.

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