Tag: retail

Nike Deploys AR In Store To Demo Customized Shoes

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
A Nike store in Paris has started using augmented reality to show customers what their personalized running shoes would look like. Working with SmartPixels, a French AR company, Nike is letting customers configure the colors of a running shoe on a store tablet and use a hologram projector to overlay the colors onto an actual white shoe. This way, Nike hopes to give customers a better look at how their customization would look in physical form as opposed to a flat digital rendering.  

What Brands Need To Do
Pokémon Go introduced U.S. consumers to mobile AR technology last summer, but brands are only starting to explore the possibilities that AR marketing brings. At this year’s CES, we saw brands like BMW and Gap showcased AR apps made for product demos. And this AR initiative from Nike points to a new way that retail and fashion brands can experiment with AR technologies and deliver a captivating customer experience.

If you’d like to get some help to figure out how augmented reality can enhance your customer experience and drive new opportunities for your brand, or simply to try out the HoloLens demo we have to experience the transformative power of AR, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Birchbox To Open A Physical Store In Paris

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Online beauty retailer Birchbox is set to open its second brick-and-mortar store in Paris, following its first physical store that opened in NYC in 2014. The company plans to deliver a store experience that emulates the “beauty products in a box” subscription service it offers online, allowing customers to personalize their own box of sample-sized products from the store’s shelves or buy full-sized products. Birchbox, founded in 2010, now claims claims one million subscribers across the U.S. and a few European markets.

What Brands Need To Do
This is the latest addition to the ongoing trend where online retailers are branching out into the brick-and-mortar world. A most prominent example in this regard, of course, is Amazon, which has opened several physical bookstores with plans to open more, including one in Manhattan. Besides bookstores, Amazon is also piloting an innovative grocery store concept called Amazon Go that is register-free. After all, physical retail still accounts for nearly 90 percent of all retail transactions. Therefore, it makes sense for an e-retailer like Birchbox to try to recreate their online customer experience in the real world to attract new customers. As shopper behaviors continue to evolve, retailers need to better utilize customer data to connect with shoppers across all sales channels by taking a more personalized approach.

The Lab has extensive experience working with retail 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 retail experience and offered an innovative take on in-store sampling with a digital beauty bar powered by tablet apps. If you’d like to learn more about how to modernize your in-store experiences, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat

P&G Tests AI-Powered Shelf Displays That Track And Analyze Customers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Procter & Gamble has started testing a new in-store retail technology named shelfPoint to monitor and gather information about customers. Developed by San Diego-based tech startup Cloverleaf, the shelfPoint is a strip of digital display that wrap around retail shelves. Equipped with optical sensors and powered by an AI-powered algorithm, the displays are able to track the facial expressions of customers at shelf and pick up anonymous information about shoppers such as age and gender. Cloverleaf says it is working to add later this year the capability of tracking what customers picked up from the shelf. Besides P&G, Dell is currently testing this product in a Micro Center store in Houston, Texas.

What Brands Need To Do
This is an exciting new product for brick-and-mortar retailers because it combines AI and facial tracking to offer marketers insights about the customers standing in front of their store displays and checking out the products on shelves. If Cloverleaf can find a way to dynamically link the content displayed on shelfPoint screens to the customer data they gathered, this would become a powerful tool for real-time, personalized in-store targeting. As retail tech continues to evolve, retailers and CPG brands need to pay attention to the innovations happening in this space and be willing to try new products that enhance in-store experiences.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience working with retail, beauty, and CPG clients to create and implement digitally-enhanced experiences for their stores. The recently-opened NYX Cosmetics store at Union Square is a proud showcase of our team’s work in crafting a digitally enhanced, innovative retail experience. If you’d like to learn more about how your brand can develop an updated retail strategy and implement digital-driven retail solutions to transform your in-store experience, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image courtesy of Cloverleaf’s site

Foursquare Teams Up With Nielsen To Map Offline Attribution Of Online Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Foursquare is teaming up with Nielsen to track the offline attributions of online ads, especially in terms of how they drive consumers into stores. As part of the partnership, Attribution by Foursquare will be integrated into Nielsen’s digital measurement products. This will generate real-time behavioral insights of anonymized consumers for customers of Nielsen’s measurement products, allowing them to measure the real-world impact of their digital campaigns.

What Brands Should Do
In the past, marketers would turn to Foursquare for measuring increases in foot traffic and go to Nielsen to measure in-store spending. Now with this integration, brand marketers can judge the effectiveness of their online campaigns in one place with a more streamlined process. As more and more brands come to realize the importance of location data in measuring the full impact of digital campaigns, more and more ad platforms such as the ones from Google, Facebook, and Snapchat have all made efforts to team up with location data providers and improve their capability in tracking offline attributions. More brands may benefit from this trend and should take note of new tools as they become available.

 

Source: MediaPost

Mall Of America And Nordstrom Launch Chatbots To Better Serve Holiday Shoppers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Retailers continue to explore new customer experiences powered by chatbots as two more prominent U.S. retailers launched their respective bot services. Mall of America, the nation’s largest shopping center located just south of Minneapolis, worked with IBM to leverage Watson’s cognitive computing power to develop a chatbot service that can help visitors navigate the sprawling shopping center and suggest routes and activities according to user input on how much time they have and what they are looking for. The chatbot is accessible via MoA’s Facebook Page as well as via a mobile web browser.

Similarly, Nordstrom launched its first chatbot on the Facebook Messenger and Kik on Monday to help holiday shoppers pick out gift items. The bot will start by asking a series of questions about who they are shopping for and then suggests appropriate gifts from Nordstrom’s online store accordingly. Nordstrom says the chatbot will available to consumers up until December 24.

What Brands Should Do
This is the latest example in retailers exploring chatbots’ potential in conversational ecommerce. Earlier this week, Sam’s Club also launched a “gift genie” chatbot that aims to help shoppers select holiday gifts. The rise of conversational commerce points to changing consumer behavior on mobile and a shift in brand-customer interaction.  According to a recent research from DigitasLBi and Harris Poll, more than a third of U.S shoppers surveyed said they’d be willing to make a purchase through a chatbot and spend as much as $55.80 on each order. As more brands start to realize the vast potential of chatbots, it is imperative that they find the right partner to work with to develop effective conversational customer experiences.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building branded chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a chatbot experience supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on messaging apps and other conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client and learning opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat & Business Insider

L’Oréal Canada Taps Shoppable Video To Enhance Influencer Marketing

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Aiming to accelerate its ecommerce growth and enhance its influencer marketing program, L’Oréal Canada is teaming up with Toronto-based mobile tech firm dubdub to leverage its  “dubcandy” app to convert viewers and boost online sales. The app supports shoppable video content that can link out to retailer websites, and L’Oréal is looking to use it to set up a new compensation model for influencer campaigns based on conversions.

What Brands Should Do
WIth the recent explosion of makeup tutorial videos and online influencers, many beauty brands are figuring out the best way to integrate influencer marketing into their existing content strategies. This move by L’Oréal suggests that one way to do so may be combining it with shoppable content. Not only does it allows L’Oréal to monetize video content across their influencer network, it also provides a quantitative way to measure the performance of their influencer content.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience working with beauty and CPG clients to create and implement retail experiences that utilize social and influencer content. The recently-opened NYX Cosmetics store at Union Square, featuring a “Colorcast” digital sculpture that displays NYX’s social content in fascinating, color-coordinated combinations, is a proud showcase of our team’s work in this space and elevated NYX as one of the most innovative digital beauty brands of 2016 named by WWD. If you’d like to learn more about how your brand can develop an updated retail strategy and implement digital-driven solutions to modernize your retail experience, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: PressWire

Sam’s Club Launches “Gift Genie” Chatbot On Facebook Messenger

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Members-only retail chain Sam’s Club launched its first Facebook Messenger bot today to make it easier for customers to find the right gifts for family and  friends. Dubbed “gift genie,” the bot is created by Rockfish Interactive and Conversable and uses a combination of both natural language conversational exploration and random gift idea generation to help Sam’s Club shoppers quickly find suitable gifts by categories.

What Brands Should Do
This is the latest example in brands exploring chatbots’ potential in conversational ecommerce. Previously, eBay and TGI Fridays launched their respective Messenger bots to sell directly on the messaging app whereas fashion brands such as Burberry have used Messenger to launch new product lines. The rise of conversational commerce points to changing consumer behavior on mobile and a shift in brand-customer interaction. Therefore, other brands should take note and start developing a strategy for conversational commerce.

The Lab has extensive knowledge about reaching consumers on mobile messaging apps and building branded chatbots. The new NiroBot we build in collaboration with Ansible for Kia delivers comprehensive product information about the all-new Niro model via friendly chats. If you’re interested in reaching your audience on messaging apps and better serving them with a chatbot, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) for more information or to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Panasonic Debuts Smart Shopping Basket That Can Tally Your Bill

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following Amazon’s awe-inspiring introduction of a checkout-free grocery shop, Panasonic today joined the race to automate the retail experience with a smart shopping basket. Capable of scanning the items shoppers put in the basket, tallying up the bill, and automatically bagging up the purchases at the end of the shopping trip, this smart shopping basket is designed to make shopping more convenient and frictionless without full-on surveillance. Panasonic is currently testing the prototype at a Lawson convenience store in Osaka, Japan where the company is headquartered.

What Retailers Should Do
As retail technology continues to evolve at an incredible speed, it is becoming increasingly important for retailers to leverage those technological advances to modernize their retail experiences both online and in-store. For example, an interactive digital station would make product sampling much more fun and effective, as our recent work with Hershey’s has demonstrated. Even smaller things such as integrating your loyalty program into mobile payment system would greatly improve your customer experience and boost brand loyalty.

The Lab has extensive experience working with retail, beauty, and CPG clients to create and implement digitally-enhanced experiences for their stores. The recently-opened NYX Cosmetics store at Union Square is a proud showcase of our team’s work in crafting a digitally enhanced, innovative retail experience. If you’d like to learn more about how your brand can develop an updated retail strategy and implement digital-driven solutions to transform your retail experience, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Brands Can Now Use Facebook’s Dynamic Ads To Drive App Installs

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook has updated its Dynamic Product Ads to allow brands to drive mobile app installs with more efficiency. Now brands with serving product ads on Facebook can instruct users that are browsing its product ads to install the branded mobile apps directly. This adds to the direct-response nature of the dynamic ad units, which delivers better results than ordinary mobile app install ads, according to Facebook, as they target users already interested in the product and brand.

What Brands Should Do
Just in time for the final push of this holiday shopping season, brands and retailers would be smart to leverage this new feature to spice up their dynamic ads and reach Facebook users more efficiently. Even if the installs don’t drive immediate returns, they can carry some long-term benefits, as having an app installed on a shopper’s smartphone keeps it top of mind.

For more information on how retailers can effectively reach connected consumers by taking a mobile-powered, omnichannel approach, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: VentureBeat

IPG Media Lab Matches Hershey With Vengo For An Innovative Take On Product Sampling

Posted on by Lab Team

Hershey looks to build buzz for the launch of its new Cookie Layer Crunch bar with a digital twist, thanks to a partnership with interactive vending machine maker Vengo orchestrated by IPG Media Lab and Universal McCann. Aiming to build social buzz and engage consumers with a fun, innovative sampling experience, the confectionery giant will place two branded Vengo interactive vending machines in Radio City Music Hall starting today, as well as one at the Hershey Chocolate World in Pennsylvania.

How It Works
This fun sampling experience begins with the Vengo machine instructing customers to take a selfie and choose from multiple branded, holiday-themed filters to make the photo more festive in real time. They will then receive a free Hershey’s Cookie Layer Crunch bar as a reward after entering their mobile number to get the selfie sent to their phone.  Throughout the experience, they are encouraged to share their holiday photo on social media.

What Brands Need To Know
Our core design aims to capitalize on the selfie filter craze and bring some fun interactivity to vending machines and product sampling. The branded holiday filters will help generate organic social buzz for Hershey’s product launch as customers are incentivized to share their personalized photos on social channels.

This type of digital OOH solution offers an effective way to reach consumers in the real world as it operates as a unique digital experience at a landmark physical location and bridges the gap between mobile, social, and OOH campaigns for maximal consumer engagement.

How We Can Help
The Lab’s Hershey team is proud to have played an integral role in facilitating this partnership and working with both sides in designing, building, testing, and implementing this next-gen vending machine experience. We developed a customized operating application for these bespoke Hershey-Vengo machines, leveraging facial recognition and tracking technologies to smoothly apply the branded filters in real time.

Our proprietary real-time selfie filter application is highly customizable and applicable to other in-store digital installations. If you’re interested in learning more about this or simply want to discuss how to leverage emerging technologies to modernize your campaigns, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit.

hersheys-vengo-wrap