Amazon’s Go concept store is the perfect example of digital technology doing what it does best: getting out the way. The checkout-free shop uses proximity sensors, cameras and an app to make the in-store experience so seamless that you can literally pick items off the shelf, walk out with them, and have them automatically billed to your account.
This simple focus on making the user experience as smooth as possible is a sharp contrast to how many marketing teams have tried to maximise in-store technology. Conversations around proximity sensors or beacons typically focus on actively getting consumers to go out of their way to fulfil a brand’s desires, or interrupting them as they use their phone.
It’s a marketing dream that a consumer in the crisp aisle could receive a notification on their phone directing them to a new drink three aisles away that would go perfectly with their prawn cocktail crisps, and perhaps even offer them a trial coupon to entice them. Once there, why not notify them of a personalised buy-one-get-one-free offer on a chocolate bar their loyalty card data tells us they used to love, but haven’t picked up in a while?
You can see the attraction to marketers who can cash in on the phone in your pocket and use it, and all sorts of data, to their advantage. The trouble, of course, comes when you start thinking of the consumer experience you’re creating. For most people, grocery shopping is at best an enjoyable errand, at worse a traumatic experience dragging around kicking and screaming kids. Their mission on entering a store is to find everything they want and get out as quickly as possible.
No doubt there’s a certain type of person who’d happily bounce across a supermarket if it got them the best deals, but for most people the prospect of turning shopping into a complex treasure hunt is far from appealing. Similarly, just because you’re checking your Facebook newsfeed in the checkout queue doesn’t mean you’ll want to abandon your place and head back into the melee when an interesting offer pops up.
Digital marketing efforts and platforms need to start by bringing genuine utility to people. That’s why the satellite navigation app Waze has gone from strength to strength, offering a route-finding service, into which occasionally an advert is shown.
Ad-first services still haven’t properly taken off – if consumers aren’t using an app to their advantage in their daily lives they’re unlikely to want to install it just to interact with your advert. If marketers want to divert shoppers around different parts of a supermarket and past their products, they need to find a genuinely useful way of doing so. Perhaps the answer is an app that can take your shopping list, map out where every item is in the shop, and guide you round it like an indoor satnav? It still feels a little over-engineered, but perhaps some people would find a use for it and be open to having special offers flagged along the journey.
Truthfully, there’s an even bigger lesson to learn: that for the most part we need to stop asking people to do anything at all. It’s usually hard enough just to make shoppers aware of your product and to stay front of mind when it comes time to buying it, let alone wanting to force them through hoops along the way.
Stop asking what we can get consumers to do with digital technology (and subsequently which needy messaging and desperate incentives we’ll need to try to force them to do it) and start thinking about how digital technology can seamlessly get out of their way. Even a platform such as Facebook, which seemingly offers an easy way to drive this “engagement”, abandoned its focus on this years ago, pointing marketers instead to how it could get their messages in front of billions of largely passive users. It’s painful that much of the industry is still chasing these vanity metrics or trying to force people away from what they want to do, which is to swipe on to the next story in their feed.
It’s definitely a challenge for traditional marketing that consumers are turning to mobile and digital screens, and it’s disrupting all industries. The mobile phone, for instance, is now arguably the main competitor for chewing gum and chocolate sales at the checkout as we choose to stare at it rather than be led into other temptations. Yet advertisers need to stay routed in very clear laws of marketing and not get led astray by the temptation to try new things for the sake of them. You’ll need a lot of people to know your product exists, and to think about it when and where it’s available, for it to fly off the shelves. It’s a classic challenge that needs a solid creative and media response, and it’s a lot more rewarding than trying to chase a shopper round a virtual supermarket maze or get them to take your Facebook quiz.
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