Less is more

I came across a very interesting white paper by Kaon Interactive on how to create a "wow" factor in the retail customer's experience. The paper begins with citing some very common obstructions to achieving this in the retail stores. A summary is given below

1. When too many product features or categories are available, customers find it difficult to understand and evaluate options. This results in them either choosing the cheapest product as price is something they can easily evaluate. This leads to them being dissatisfied at a later stage due to lack of features.
2. The space available on the shelf is insufficient to provide a informative presentation of the product assortment to the customer leading to an underinformed customer
3. While overcoming customers’ inconsistencies in decision making and physical space limitations are both challenges for retailers, finding the sales support to help customers make a purchase, and more importantly, make the right purchase is perhaps the retailer’s greatestconcern.

The paper talks about generating a positive emotional response in the customer while shopping - "Emotional response is also kindled when consumers better understand and appreciate the product they are about to purchase. While providing product information that details how a product is used, or clearly explains why a feature is present sounds obvious, it’sactually a rare occurrence in the retail world"

The first factor cited by the paper is corroborated in a recent presentation "Re-imageering Retail" given by Thom Blischok of Information Resources Inc. As per Mr. Blischok "84% of shoppers are fully satisfied with 23% of the merchandise at a typical store". This is also seen in terms of a trend towards "express" store formats which is expected to "grow from around 20 locations today to 4,000 by 2010"

Active Design

Retail consumers are a changing bunch and its very important for a retailer to stay on top of what her choices are and how to make her "Act" on those choices. A very interesting article by Jonathan Dodd of G2 Worldwide published in the Hub Magazine delves into the idea of "Active Design".

The Need: Mr. Dodd says that experience based shopping can no longer be restricted to the high end retailers like Printemps, Slefridges etc. "....in a world where virtually every product category is suffering from brand proliferation and time-pressured shoppers are being enticed by ever more sophisticated retail offerings, effective design has to do more. It must work for the benefit of the shopper as well as the retailer and brand owner. It has to sell actively." An interesting statistic provided in the article states "According to POPAI, supermarket shoppers are exposed to 1.6 pieces of instore material every second. And yet less than one in five is noticed"

In the article, Mr Dodd enunciates some basic principles of "Active Design" through the example of Apple stores and says that the same idea can apply to supermarket stores which carry a much wider assortment.

Smart Cart

Continuing with the trend towards retailers going green a concept of a smart cart with an installed computer is being explored reports the Wall Street Journal in this article (subscription maybe required). A study by EDS as per the article indicates that this cart can be used by customers to scan the barcode to get most of the nutritional information which would otherwise be crammed into excessive packaging on the items and thereby taking up more resources. The other side to it is that it will help a health and environmentally conscious customer be better informed on the contents of the item from a calorie, ethical treatment perspective. So in a way its another extension of service to an increasing creed of customers who are more health and environment conscious. But does this end here? So what do retailers have to leverage out of this? The details of the on board computer arent revealed to examine its capabilities but some of the things that come to my mind are

1. Item correlations: If there is a way to store the information on what items were scanned by the customer in a specific aisle, it gives some good data to plan assorments in a specific department
2. Travel time: The computer data can possibly be used to identify how much the customer travels on an average between picking up items. Can the aisle/shelf positioning be improved so that the customer can get to what he needs faster saving her some time?
3. Promotions: On scanning an item, can the computer display any special promotions that are going on for that item
4. Private Label: For every branded item scanned by the customer, can the system reveal the price and location of an equivalent private label item.
5. Recipes: Can the computer suggest some quick meal recipes in which the scanned item can be used. If the customer finds it interesting, maybe it can lead her to buy the other ingredients to complete the purchase and also print the recipe.

Maybe I am reading too much into the smart cart computer. I will watch out for more details on it and follow up with the post.