Tag: in-store

French Department Store Deploys Augmented Reality For In-Store Experience

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
French department store chain Galeries Lafayette is using mobile-powered augmented reality to engage shoppers with a unique in-store experience. Working with startup Sky Boy, the retailer has launched an AR experience that turns its Paris flagship store into a winter wonderland. Shoppers can follow the story of a family of polar bears leaving home for Paris due to climate change by downloading a free mobile app or with tablets provided by Galeries Lafayette when they are at specific spots on the store’s second floor.

Sticking to the campaign’s arctic theme, Galeries Lafayette will be offering a number of handbags in ivory or pastel hues from brands such as Dior, Gucci, and Chloé as part of its holiday shopping guide.

What Brands Should Do
This holiday campaign serves as a cool example of how retailers can leverage emerging technologies to engage with shoppers with a good story. With more and more consumers choosing the convenience of online shopping over physical retail, brick-and-mortar retailers need to shape up and embrace digital technologies to attract customers to visit the stores.

The Lab has extensive experience working with retail, beauty, and CPG clients to create and implement digitally-enhanced experiences for their stores. Our recent work with NYX Cosmetics incorporated the brand’s social assets into its in-store experience and offered an innovative take on sampling with a digital beauty bar. Please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) if you’d like to learn more about how to develop a mobile-driven retail strategy that bridges the gap between physical and digital shopping experience.

 

Source: Luxury Daily

Lead image courtesy of Galeries Lafayette‘s Instagram

Facebook Partners With Square And Marketo To Track Offline Purchases

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
A week after announcing its partnership with Quantium to improve its offline measurements, Facebook has once again stepped up its attribution game by partnering with Square and Marketo, both makers of point-of-sale systems, to track how well their ads lead to offline purchases. Even when no purchase is made, the social network will still be able to track store visits thanks to a new feature that matches smartphone coordinates from GPS, beacons, WiFi, radio signals, and cell towers with store locations.

What Brands Need To Do
With digital ad measurement becoming more accurate and sophisticated, advertisers have turned toward tracking their impact in the real world. Measuring offline sales and store visits driven by digital ads is especially important for retailers and CPG brands, as those metrics are the typical KPIs for measuring their campaigns. As social platforms appeal to advertisers by building out their attribution tools, brands should learn to leverage the new data they generate to inform their current and future campaigns.

 

Source: TechCrunch

How American Girl Is Modernizing Its Retail Experience

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Toy retailer American Girl is moving its New York flagship store from Fifth Avenue to Rockefeller Center with a revamped concept in fall 2017. The Mattel-owned brand is looking to reinvent its retail experience to offer more customization. For example, the new store will include an AG Signature Studio where customers can design clothes and accessories for both their dolls and themselves. It will also have private rooms for hosting “personalized parties” and a salon that will help both the customers and their dolls get new looks.

Besides customization, the retailer is looking to draw in doll-lovers by offering unique in-store experiences. The store will debut a media studio, where the retailer plans to host animation workshops for creating stop-motion videos with American Girl dolls, as well as cooking and yoga classes. Digital kiosks will be installed to help with store navigation and booking reservations, which will also be synced up with a new American Girl app.

What Retailers Need To Do
By focusing on personalization and offering unique in-store experiences, American Girl provides a great example of how retailers can modernize their retail experience and give customers good reasons to visit. With more and more consumers choosing the convenience of online shopping over physical stores, brick-and-mortar retailers need to take the initiative in creating in-store experiences that provide added value for customers.

For more information on how retailers can leverage digital technology to modernize their retail experience, please check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Racked

Ralph Lauren And Sephora Testing Interactive Retail Experiences

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In a bid to lure more customers into their stores, some retailers have been experimenting with new technologies to make their in-store experiences more fun and interactive. Ralph Lauren will soon start testing interactive fitting rooms at its Polo flagship store in New York City. Equipped with smart mirrors created by Oak Labs, these fitting rooms will be able to recognize the clothing items that shoppers brought in via RFID tags and display them on a large touchscreen. Shoppers can use it to request different sizes and colors of items to try on without leaving the fitting rooms.

Similarly, Sephora also added some interactivity to its new retail store in San Francisco. The new store features a “Beauty Workshop,” where customers can watch makeup tutorial videos, take a class with a Sephora sales member, and share their makeup results online. Sephora also set up a digital “Beauty Board” in store, which displays user-generated content from social media that coincides with current beauty trends on a shoppable screen.

What Retailers Need To Do
Studies show that millennial consumers value experiences over ownership, creating the so-called “experience economy” as a result. Brick-and-mortar retailers should tap into this consumer trend by offering unique in-store experiences in order to better compete with online retailers. In this regard, both Ralph Lauren and Sephora serve as good examples in incorporating digital technologies to create engaging in-store shopping experiences that ultimately drive in-store purchases.

 

Source: Engadget and Digiday

Rebecca Minkoff Shows The Usefulness Of In-Store Behavioral Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Women’s clothing retailer Rebecca Minkoff opened its first “connected store” in SoHo, NYC last November, integrated with in-store tracking technology powered by eBay. The platform identifies how customers are interacting with products, such as which items are taken into the fitting room, and what’s being purchased or left behind.  The brand has also made changes to its collections based on the insights gained from the tracking data. Almost a year later, the brand has seen some great success, reportedly selling three times more than anticipated.

What Brands Should Do
Traditionally, retail brands tend to focus on analyzing purchase data to determine inventory and corresponding promotional strategies. Rebecca Minkoff’s successful experiment with comprehensive in-store tracking shows that retail brands need to pay attention to other behavioral data that indicates purchase intent, even on a granular item-by-item base, so as to better understand their customers.

 

Source: Digiday

McDonald’s Tested In-Store Beacons To Positive Results

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Mobile Marketer

McDonald’s tested a new in-store proximity program at 15 McDonald Cafés in Istanbul, Turkey, sending beacon-enabled promotions to its customers via Shopping Genie, a popular Turkish loyalty app, with some very positive results. Over two six-week periods, the fast food chain staple saw a conversion rate of 20 percent, with an impressive 30% of users who received the promotion using it more than once.

 

Chinese Jewelry Retailer Deploys In-Store Beacons Via WeChat

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Mobile Commerce Daily

Chinese jewelry brand Chow Tai Fook teamed up with Beijing-based beacon-provider Sensoro to install a beacon-powered e-coupon distribution system that operates via popular messaging app WeChat, in 237 stores across 4 major cities in China. The campaign, which reportedly resulted in over 32,000 participating consumers and over $16 million in sales, highlights the advantages of seamlessly integrating beacon interfaces within an app that consumers are already using and familiar with.

Get Ready For A New Industry Standard for Mobile and In-Store Measurement

Posted on by Richard Yao

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, six ad agencies, including IPG Mediabrands, recently selected Placed’s attribution product as the preferred tool for digital to in-store measurement, signaling a rising industry standard for mobile measurement.  As part of the partnership, the agencies will also get access to Placed’s insights tool that provides location analytics and examines customer traffic patterns.

Such new industry standard is both necessary and inevitable, considering the increasing prominence of smartphones in consumers’ everyday lives and the industry’s lack of efficient tools for mobile-to-store measurement. “We really look at attribution as a metric that’s going to help grow the category of mobile and give clients more confidence in mobile,” remarked our managing partner Chad Stoller, when IPG took a minority stake in Placed in September last year.

A confluence of new technology trends – from new, more intimate interfaces and advanced curation filters to hyperlocal technologies – is emerging as an unprecedented kind of measurable intimacy that connects brands with the modern consumers through their personal mobile devices. And the industry needs to keep up in this new trend by embracing new mobile measurement tools so as to better serve their audience with contextualized and relevant brand messages.

 

Editor’s Note: updated on 2/20/2014 to better reflect our 2015 Outlook.

Kate Spade’s Aggressive In-store iPad Integration

Posted on by Lab Team

In a world where shoppers can access limitless inventory and product information, Kate Spade needed to give shoppers a reason to come in-store.  In response, the luxury retailers swapped out paper signs for iPads that display pricing and promotional information in select Tokyo locations. Beyond traditional displays, Kate Spade has incorporated product demos, inventory management, sharing functionality and more all geared at increasing dwell time in stores. 

IPSOS Releases Showrooming Study

Posted on by Lab Team

A new study from IPSOS and the IAB indicates showrooming leads to in-store sales. While 42% of consumers using mobile as a shopping tool made their purchase online, 30% made one in the store. For retailers, the key will be enabling product information and customer reviews in a controlled environment via a mobile app like shopkick or through digital signage. Don’t fight the phone guys, embrace it.