The range of retail format options is huge and multifaceted.
At one end of the continuum you have pure on-line retailers, to full service bricks and mortar retail at the other, and everything in between.
It is the ‘everything in between’ where the development is happening, and the opportunity lies.
Apple ‘Zigged’ when everyone else was ‘Zagging’ and spent a decade and billions of dollars opening retail stores. While they are now the most successful retailer in the world on a turnover/square foot basis, the reason was more about brand building over the long term than just retail revenue. Brilliant.
Amazon has been the catalyst to the on-line gold-rush, but you have to ask yourself are they are retailer, or a data business first? They started as a retailer, simply using a different channel, but to enhance their position they have evolved into a data company that uses on line channels to sell and deliver product. With Amazon Go, they have combined bricks and mortar retail with their data capabilities, which can only become more important as they evolve their purchase of Whole Foods.
Meanwhile, B&M retail is either hunkering down, cutting costs, and generally moaning about how on-line sales are cutting their margins, or investing in their businesses, some by increasing service levels, others by setting about ‘digitising’ to compete.
Any way you look at it, the gap is in the middle.
That gap will be rapidly filled by deploying digital tools already available, or in development, based it seems on two rapidly converging technologies:
- Facial recognition, powered by our on line profiles and pattern recognition software, and
- Location definition powered by our devices and GPS.
Amazon Go is able to recognise and record stock movements from the shelf to your shopping basket, and back, as it happens, and debit your card with the purchase. It is a small step to use facial recognition as you approach a store, or product category while inside the store, and match that with your previous purchase patterns to make exclusive, and immediate offers to you tailored to your history. You do not need to be Amazon go to deploy the second part of that scenario, you just need the facial recognition and location data connected to your purchase history, and perhaps purchase intent identified by browsing history.
This combination of location, facial recognition, purchase history and browsing patterns will be the game changer in the current gap.
The question to be answered is how we as members of the public and consumers feel about this complete exposure of what has been to date private. On the one hand we seem to want the convenience and immediacy it can deliver, but on the other, remain very wary of offering up our privacy to the unknown forces that can tap the data in ways never expected or sanctioned.
However, I suspect the horse has bolted, and the gap will rapidly be filled!
Photo credit: Kristian Dye via Flikr
