Do you think that sounds like science fiction?  It’s not.

All the technology needed to deliver that experience can already be found in the Apple AppStore.

	RedLaser, owned by eBay, is a barcode-scanning application for comparison shopping and finding product information using a mobile device.  It uses the iPhone’s built in camera to take pictures of barcodes and return competitive pricing from hundreds of thousands of stores.  It’s been downloaded over 2 million times.
	Amazon Mobile includes the “Amazon Remembers” feature, which allows you to take a picture of any product, and (using the Mechanical Turk service) identify the product and put it in your wish list.  This isn’t real-time yet, but several product categories (movies and books) are already automated.
	Layar is one of many popular augmented-reality apps on the AppStore which allow you to see the iPhone’s camera output in real-time, with supplemental data overlaid on it.  For example, it can show you the nearest cafe or subway station.

The capabilities of these three apps hasn’t been combined yet, and handheld phones don’t yet have the power to do this all in real-time for an entire shelf-full of product, but at the current pace of handheld hardware evolution, it will happen in the very near future.

The mobile era has already arrived.  59% of American adults already go online wirelessly.  By 2014 there will be more mobile internet users than desktop users.   Shoppers are using mobile technology at a rapidly growing rate and teenagers are the heaviest users of mobile technology.  It is clear that using your mobile device when you shop will soon be the norm rather than the exception.

What will traditional retailers do when the likes of Amazon and eBay turn physical stores into nothing more convenient showrooms for their on-line services?  With Amazon’s Local Express Delivery, they can even neutralize the immediate gratification advantage of a physical store.

Smart retailers are going to need to find competitive advantages to build into their own mobile apps to make sure shoppers are using their apps in the store rather than those provided by their online competition.

Luckily, there are many things a savvy physical retailer can build into their apps to give them a competitive advantage.  For starters, a physical retailers app can know what is in-stock at a given time, so that it can make recommendations for immediate purchase.  A physical retailer’s app can be tied into the store’s affinity program recommending new purchases that are relevant to the shopper based on their prior purchases history. 

Most importantly, a physical retailer is now able to know where you are in the store and what you are doing.  Physical retailers need to consider building near-field transmitters into their shelves, telling your mobile app about the products in front of you, products you’re currently holding, or add-on purchases to a product have already put in your cart.

Are you making your regular family grocery trip and want to see your typical purchase list with current shelf locations and prices?  No problem, fire-up your Safeway shopping app.  Making a special trip for an embarrassing personal product, and want to opt-out of having your shopping behavior tracked?  You can do that too.

Got the sniffles?  Enter your symptoms into your handheld shopping app (instead of a not-very-private public terminal) and the app can communicate with the store, get the current inventory of cold medicines, and turn on indicator lights attached to the cold remedies that best match your symptoms.

Retail stores are definitely going to want to consider digital fact tags and/or indicator lights to provide customized assistance to each shopper.

Shoppers could use their mobile devices to get in the queue for services (deli counter, Geek Squad, Genius Bar, sales assistance, returns line, etc…), letting the shopper keep roaming the store waiting for notification that it’s their turn.

Is the screen on a mobile device too small for the rich experience you want to provide?  No problem… let the shoppers use their handheld to put products in their shopping queue,  They can then visit a terminal at a central location in the store that is able to read their queue and give them a large screen experience for the products they’re interested in.  That’s a lot more cost effective and practical than providing large format digital screens for every product in your store.

Other interesting potential features include using the mobile device to manage wish lists, shopping lists, affinity memberships, and even allowing shoppers to pay.  The mobile device could save checkout time by allowing a shopper to store their preferences (payment method, extended warranty, etc…) and in a single barcode scan transfer payment info, affinity info, and answers to all the annoying questions that clerks are often obligated to ask.

Physical retailers are already building some innovative features into their shopping apps.

	Best Buy’s iPhone app lets you see weekly specials, check your reward zone points, and make suggestions on their IdeaX exchange.  The app allows you to scan QR barcodes and get product info and reviews.  Look for Best Buy to start putting QR barcodes on every fact tag in the store, very soon.
	Walmart’s app will let you get product recommendations from your peers on your social networks, and even help you figure out the ideal size TV for your living room.
	Starbuck’s has two apps which allow you to see the balance on your Starbucks card and even re-fill it.  You can find the nearest Starbuck’s that is open right now (handy at 11pm), store your (and your friends) favorite beverages, and at some Starbucks you can even pay using your iPhone!

The future of mobile-assisted shopping is very bright.  If you’re in the retail business you need to have significant resources invested in developing your mobile strategy.

What cool mobile shopping experiences have you had, or do you wish you could have?

Vampire Power

Recently AT&T began selling the Zero Charger that shuts itself off when a device is not connected.  This made me wonder how significant vampire power is, so I did some quick math…

Taking the new iPhone 4 as an example, I assumed that the typical iPhone charger spends 4 hours a day charging an phone, 8 hours a day plugged into a fully charged phone, and 12 hours a day with no phone plugged in.  The iPhone charger uses 0.4 Watts per Hour when no phone is plugged in, and 2.24 Watts per Hour when plugged into a fully charged phone.  Apple sold 3 million iPhone 4’s in their first month.  That equates to 25 Gigawatts Hours per year, which is approximately $3Million dollars of wasted electricity.  And that’s for just 1 month of sales of one SKU!

Apple sells it’s charger for $29 vs $19 for the Zero Charger from AT&T, so clearly it would be possible for Apple, HTC, RIM, etc… to bundle smart chargers with their new products and save a SIGNIFICANT amount of electricity.  What if Best Buy mandated that after some date they would only sell mobile products that were bundled with smart chargers?

Even lower hanging fruit are all the chargers that retailers use inside their own stores.  In the United States alone, there are almost 500,000 cell phones available for demonstration.  The overwhelming majority of those are connected to merchandising systems (many of which I helped invent) that also permanently connect the phones to an inefficient charger.  Best Buy and Walmart could save a dramatic amount of energy just by using smart chargers in their own stores and/or mandating that vendors use smart chargers in their products.

Bloomberg reports, that in the face of declining financial performance, Walmart’s new COO, Bill Simon, is bringing back promotional displays at the front of store and returning more items that were removed.  Overall inventory is coming back up and pallets are returning to action ally.

It’s unclear how extensive the retreat from Project Impact will be.  It will be interesting to see what effect the change will have on their digital merchandising.  If brands can once again buy a traditional end-cap slots, will they still be willing to purchase the expensive digital end-caps?  Will Walmart be forced to reduce the fee’s for those digital end-caps?  I suspect we’ll see the digital endcaps used exclusively for bigger ticket items and products with complicated selling propositions, as fast moving consumables resort to simpler promotional opportunities.

I’ve seen similar Walmart data before, but always in private meetings, so now that the data is public I can comment… Here is why you shouldn’t believe it.

Contrary to Spicer’s article, Digital Merchandising is already widely used in retail merchandising.  But the majority of deployments are NOT delivering paid ads.  The video based displays are used to enhance shopping experiences, communicate complicated value propositions, and drive incremental sales.

Retailers make money by selling products and services for a profit.  Not by capturing an audience to deliver paid advertisements to.  Yes, retailers do try and get their supply chain partners to share in the cost of operating the store through the use of co-op advertising, slotting fees, merchandising accrual systems, etc…  But at the end of the day, retailers don’t want promotions that merely shift sales from one brand to another, they want great experiences that drive incremental sales.

Walmart has a major initiative underway called Project Impact.  The goals are to focus on the most strategic product categories and reduce their efforts in less important ones.  They are also trying to dramatically reduce store clutter, and improve the shopping experience.  Project Impact is being implemented in the form of major remodels to 1000’s of stores.

Because of Project Impact, there is now less shelf space and fewer promotional opportunities available to non-strategic brands.  If you’re one of these brands, you are at risk for getting a smaller piece of the pie.

So because Walmart is offering viewer promotional opportunities,  won’t they generate less co-op dollars?  Not if they charge more for each opportunity… and that’s where the Walmart Smart Network (aka Walmart TV 2.0) comes in!

For the brands that still have shelf space at Walmart, you can now buy a promotional slot on the Smart Network (that includes promotional content on a digital merchandising system and premium product placement on a Walmart endcap). 

The Walmart Smart Network actually has three different types of digital signage.

1.   Welcome Signs – 57” LCDs w/o audio that hang over the front doors of the store and are (potentially) seen by all shoppers as they enter.  Typically running 5 second spots.  200 million people go by these signs weekly (106 million people watched the superbowl where ads sold for $2.6M).
2.   Category Signs – 57” LCD signs w/ option for audio that hang in strategic departments (Health Grocery, Electronics).  These signs are sometimes mounted in landscape and other times in portrait. Typically running 10 second sports.
3.   Digital Endcaps – that include a smaller portrait format display with product specific content and includes product placement on end-cap.  Screens appear touch-capable although I haven’t seen an interactive one yet. You’ve got to wonder how much the digital sign is helping shoppers with the $0.48 ramen noodles.

Walmart has a team of people that sell these new SmartNetwork promotional opportunities and they are more expensive than brands are accustomed to paying for in-store co-op.   Those Ad-Sales people need to demonstrate a good return on investment for the brands.  And that’s why Walmart has published data on the efficacy of the SmartNetwork, to sell ads, not out of some sort of altruistic gift to the digital signage community. 

Walmart hired Candance Adams a very credible Customer Insight exec with a PhD, and she partnered with DS-IQ which is full of ex-Microsoft rocket-scientists.  So I’m sure the research methodology is very legitimate.  But here is the rub… the raw data get’s interpreted by people tasked with ad sales, and it’s there output that Walmart publishes (don’t we all know better than to trust ad men?).

So when Walmart says that a food item that buys a spot on their network get’s a 13 percent lift in sales, or a health/beauty product gets a 28 percent.  What they don’t point out is that in their program is not just a spot on a digital sign, but also a product placement on a scarce end-cap!  How much of that 28% lift is a result of the end-cap vs. the digital component?  Walmart doesn’t say and there is no (published) DS-IQ study on the sales lift of the end-cap w/o the sign.   When the SmartNetwork was launched, Stephen Quinn the CMO at Walmart said the goal was a 30% lift for the endcap products, which he said would typically result in a 5% lift to the entire category the product was in.  As you can see, Walmart now says that even the most successful product is not achieving that goal.  Further, Walmart doesn’t even try to claim to that the Category signs or the Welcome sign have a measurable effect on sales of a particular product.

The bottom line is that the Smart Network is all about keeping Walmart’s co-op revenue flowing in, while reducing the visual clutter and making Walmart a more pleasant place to shop.  It’s a great strategy for Walmart but it’s far from evidence that digital signage advertisements drive retail sales.

I’d love to hear from Brand Managers that have bought into the program (even privately).  What are you’re thoughts?

Update:  It appears Walmart may be re-thinking project impact.  Also, you can find more photo’s at http://photos.retailgeek.com/Retail/Project-Impact/.

So I thought Powell’s Books offer to create a digital photo of visitors in front of the landmark book retailer, with their own name on the marquee, is a brilliant way to make visitors feel like the own the brand.

For those not from Portland, Powell’s “City of Books” is one of the largest independent book retailers in the world with over 1 million titles, and is arguably Portland, Oregon’s #1 tourist destination.

For this retail campaign.  Powell’s set up a photo-booth inside the store, with a lighting kit, green screen, and friendly photographer.  They collect some information, shoot your photo, and e-mail you the final composition in near real time.

Taking the iconic photo outside the store would force tourists to stand in the middle of a busy intersection.  So Powell’s gives you good lighting, the custom marquee, and a 20% off coupon, all from the safety of their store.

In the process, they capture your e-mail address and put you on their electronic mailing list.  Everything about the program is well executed.  They developed a series of humorous posters that are used as window displays to advertise the service to passers by.

The form you fill out asks for permission to put your photo on the walls of their store and/or their website, and put you on their mailing list.  You can opt out of any of those, but even the wording of the opt out is well done…

“No, I can’t bear a long distance relationship.  Please do not subscribe me to your newsletter or send me a 20% off coupon.”

When your picture arrives via e-mail it has both screen and high-res versions, with an easy ShareThis link to upload directly to Facebook, Twitter, etc…

With the explosion of social media, giving consumers photos that they can use is an inexpensive, but highly effective marketing tool (social albums, profile pics, mobile phone wallpaper, etc…).  It’s the modern equivalent of the bumper-sticker.  Powell’s has done it very well.  You can see a photo gallery of the campaign here.

What can you do in your store to change “the Store” to “My Store” in the minds of your shoppers?

That’s exactly why companies like Walmart employ “greeters” to welcome you to their store.  But too many retailers delegate the role of store greeter to an employee without retaining the spirit and the results are tragic.

Walmart greeters primary role to “greet” customers, any other duties they are assigned are secondary.  Walmart overtly hires friendly, elderly employees for the role, who evoke a shoppers memories of their grandparents.  They just seem sincere.  Clearly Walmart didn’t invent store greeters (they first introduced them in 1983), but for a chain of more than 4,000 stores and 300,000 employees they do it remarkably well.  Here’s a Walmart greeter with over 3,000 fan on their facebook page.

Unfortunately, too many retailers identify an employee who has some other primary purpose and assign greeting duties as a secondary function.  These employees are usually hired for their suitability for their primary function (inventory or loss prevention, for example) and frequently lack the disposition to be a greeter.  Too often these employees will shout “hello” to a new customer without ever making eye contact, simply to check “greet customer” off of their mental check list.  As a shopper entering the store, the insincere greeting from some unseen corner of the store is very off-putting.

Worst of all, many retailers assign this secondary function to an employee who happens to already be stationed at the front of the store… the loss prevention specialist!  When the Security Guard greets you at the door, he may say “Welcome to the store”, but what we hear is “I’m watching you!”.  If the two most memorable events in the shopping trip are going to be the first and the last, do you really want the first one to be accusing your customer of being a thief?

The bottom line is, having a store greeter is a great idea if your willing to make it a primary role, and hire the right people.   Otherwise you’re probably better off to just skip the greeting, and design some other feature of your store to be a great first impression.

What’s been your best or worst experience with a store greeter?

After the first day of the show, show defiantly “feels” smaller than it has in the past (official numbers aren’t out yet).  Clearly there are fewer exhibitors, and traffic on the show floor felt light as well.  The segment of the show dedicated to digital merchandising (digital signage and kiosks) is particularly light, continuing a several year trend, it seems that exhibitors in this space are opting to exhibit at the Digital Signage Expo instead.

Attendance issues aside, there continue to be a lot of great retailer marketers at the show, and insightful observations about the future of retail were easy to come by.

Here are some key trends identified by retail notables and GlobalShop conference speakers Wendy Liebmann, WSL/Strategic Retail; Tom Moseman, Envirosell; Joe Feczko, Macy’s; Lee Peterson, WD Partners; and Ken Nisch, JGA:

• Shoppers will remain more cautious, deliberate and value oriented.
• Online has empowered shoppers with information, yet they have not rejected brick and mortar stores. They want to be dazzled and have an emotional experience when they shop.
• Retailers must understand their shoppers on an emotional level, not just with demographics. 
• In order to create a compelling environment, retailers will have to integrate data mining with a synchronization of all retail disciplines: visual merchandising, store fixturing, design and operations, digital, point-of-purchase and marketing services. No more silos.
• Connecting emotionally with shoppers requires 360-degree marketing embracing all touch points from in store to social media.
• Retailers will have to innovate continually, making it more urgent to stay on top of trends and network with colleagues and suppliers.  It’s no longer enough to develop a prototype store, test it, reset all stores and then forget it. The new normal is a fleet of stores in constant flux.

I definitely think that the global recession has permanently changed shopping behaviors.  I really buy into the theory first put forward by brand marketers at Henkel that traditional demographics based marketing is dead.  You can no longer expect all people from a particular demographic, psychographic, or economic stratus to shop in a certain way.  Instead we need to think more about the specific missions and shopping style of those that visit our stores, and tailor in-store experience to their needs.  Henkel likes to talk about three distinct shopping styles:

Shoptimizers are most likely to be influenced in their choices by pre-shopping stimuli such as circulars and coupons. In fact, this group accounts for virtually 100% of coupon usage.

Mainstreeters do far less pre-planning and rarely save coupons, so their store choices are more likely to be influenced by location, convenience and price reputation. This group is highly sensitive to in store messaging and promotions.

Carefrees bypass pre-planning, and once inside the store, tend to ignore prices and promotions and simply buy what they like.

My own co-workers are doing a great job in MTI’s booth at the show.  Despite the slower floor traffic, we captured as many leads as we have in the past several years, and we’ve had great conversations with many of our client who have been nice enough to drop by an spend some time with us.  If you are at the show, please stop by booth #2230 and say hello.  If you’re not at the show, feel free to use the comments here to share your thoughts.

CES is the largest trade show in the US, it’s hosted in Las Vegas every January and it focuses on the Consumer Electronics industry.  A number of blogs do a great job covering the products introduced at the show.  Engadget is a great place to start.  Here is a nicely organized photo library from the show.

My interests at CES are more about what retail designers and in-store marketers can learn from the show.

I try to focus on two key things.

1.  What new products are being launched this year, and how will we introduce shoppers to them in-store?

2.  What tools and techniques are brands using in their own booths to capture attendee attention and deliver product knowledge that we can apply to in-store use?

New Products

3DTV – Without question the main story at this years CES is the introduction of 3D technologies to home theater and gaming systems.  Most TV manufacturers had a least one demo.  This was well timed given Avatar had just hit theaters and was setting all box office records. 

The rapid evolution of TV technology is a real paradigm shift for consumers.  Many consumers owned the same NTSC TV set for 10+ years and never had a compelling reason to upgrade.  Then less than a year after investing in their first HDTV, they may find that they now want a 3DTV.  Most of the 3DTV’s for consumers are based on active shutter technologies which means viewers will need to wear special glasses.  The early research suggest that there is a market for these new products.  DisplaySearch predicts that over 1.2M 3DTV’s will be sold this year, and NPD suggests that about a third of shoppers were interested in the new technology.  CEA conducted their own 3DTV research “3DTV: Is it for Real?” which is well worth the read if you’re a CEA member.

But this technology is going to create a number of retail challenges in stores.  If we run 3D content on TV’s, those TV’s are going to look defective and unappealing to shoppers who aren’t wearing glasses.  How do we tell those shoppers that 3DTVs are also the very best 2D TV’s?  Where will we get 3DTV content samples?  What will the brand interoperability be?  Will shoppers know if their existing BluRay player, HDMI AV Receiver, and cables are compatible?  Will shoppers have hygiene or vanity concerns about trying on 3D glasses in public?  Will the glasses be stolen?  Will they break?  Will the batteries in the glasses last?  How will shoppers know to hit the “on” button on the glasses?  Will retailers existing video distribution infrastructures support 3D?

As is often the case, most of these challenges haven’t been fully considered as the technology is being rushed to the market.  SonyStyle stores now have pre-released demos in most stores (and more often than not you’ll find the Sony power button broken on the glasses).  Best Buy expects to have 3DTV demo’s in several hundred stores this month and 1,000 by the end of the year.  

Undoubtedly, the first demo’s will be stand-alone vignettes probably from a single OEM brand.  But pretty quickly this is going to trickle down to all sorts of retail infrastructure and customer experience decisions.

SETTOP BOXES – There was also no shortage of boxes to add all kinds of downloadable content and new features to your TV.  Boxee probably got the most ink for their announcement that D-Link would be making a Boxee branded devices (Boxee Box). 

Unfortunately, consumers generally can’t tell from the typical retailers fact tags, what these things do, and why they would want one.  Many of these features are built into versions of the latest BluRay players already on the shelves but very few consumers are savvy enough to compare features like “Vudu” vs. “Pandora.”  Even Apple struggles to properly position AppleTV, it’s own offering in the space.

These products all suffer from what I call the “Tivo Problem.”  Early in the lifecyle of personal video recorders, consumers didn’t know they needed one.  Millions of shoppers would walk by the Tivo and ReplayTV boxes on the shelf and never have a clue what was offered within, but go to a friends house that already owns one, and instantly you want one!  So how do we create that same experience in store?  Live demos are certainly one way, but frankly many of these products are too complicated to learn in the 30 seconds a shopper is likely to give you, so I’m a big fan of using video to show simulated ownership experiences.  Show vignettes of consumers happily using these things in their home, and you’ll create demand.  The first OEM to get a really good Vendor Provided Display in BestBuy is going to win a lot of marketshare.

E-BOOKS – The Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and Barnes and Nobel Nook got some serious competition at CES in the form of about 1,000 different cheap devices being made by seemingly every factory in Asia.  Then later in the month, Steve Jobs gave millions of consumers permission to want one when Apple announced the IPad (which includes an eBook use-case).

I’m curious to see how these guys get merchandised at retail stores, because to me the real benefit isn’t the device itself, it’s the content I can get for the device and the use-cases they enable.  Will retailers just focus on the networking and display features of these devices, or will they tell the story that buying an IPad means never having to take out the Newspaper Recycling again?  Will the in-store signage feature pictures of hardware or of John Gresham? 

There definitely is going to be some complicated stories to tell in the store: with the Kindle you get your books wirelessly, with the iPad you get them wireless if you pay or are on free-wifi, and with the Sony Pocket Edition you need to download books on your PC and sync it with a USB cable.  What authors are available for each platform, what are the price points?  Touch Screen?  Backlit vs. Reflective?  Etc…

Shoppers are clearly going to want to see the screens and evaluate the form factors in the store, with all the live-sell merchandising and loss prevention challenges that implies.  I hope retailers don’t put these things inside of product jail (a glass display case), or try to re-use a merchandising system that was designed for an MP3 player.

WIRELESS CHARGING – Because I help so many retailers merchandise handheld devices (and because keeping the batteries on those devices charged for live demos is such a pain), lots of people are asking me about the new wireless power products.  And certainly Powermat and others are getting some good traction and shopper awareness. 

The problem is that so far all of these near field induction power solutions are proprietary and aftermarket. You need to add an adaptor to your IPhone in order to charge it on the Powermat.  The charger option for the Palm Pre can’t charge any 3rd party accessories, etc… So selling these products to consumers makes perfect sense.  Although I’ll bet return rates are high, because few retailers really explain the whole adaptor requirement very well.

But using this technology to more easily demonstrate handheld devices in the store doesn’t make much sense yet.  Today retailers use inexpensive charging adaptors (i.e. SmartCables) to charge each device.  SmartCables are much less expensive than Wireless Charging Adaptors and unlike the consumer adaptors no one has any incentive to steal SmartCables.  So I don’t think any of the current systems really replace a retailers need for a good SmartCable solution. 

However, if an industry standard were to emerge and if wireless device manufacturers pre-built the technology into their devices that was compatible with that standard, then we’d have a whole new ball game and could eliminate the need for retailers to buy and use SmartCables.  One such effort is called Qi (pronouced “Chee”).  Unfortunately there are a number of competing standards and financial interests at the moment, so this is going to take a while to play out.

The elephant in the room on all induction power solutions may be how Un-Green they are.  The energy transfer loss of these technologies is huge, some solutions require 10X the power of a direct coupled solution.

Merchandising Techniques

Show Me Don’t Tell Me – Many exhibitors did a good job of building displays into their booth to visual communicate an abstract concept.  Tell a consumer that a product has “Motion Tracking” and they probably won’t internalize the benefit, but show them a camera staying focused on a train engine as it runs circles around a track, and they will instantly want a camera with that feature.

Some of my co-workers call these sort of displays the OMSI Style (named after our local science museum that does a great job with these illustrative displays). 

Don’t tell me you are more energy efficient, brighter, cooler, smarter, better, etc…  Show me that you are, and why that’s better for me.

Get my Attention – You are in one of the most excessive cities in the world, at the largest trade show in the US, and giant TV’s are a dime a dozen, so how do you stand out from the crowd?  Exhibitors have to come up with something visually unique and novel to surprise you and capture your attention.  Getting your attention amongst all the visual clutter is first critical step to having a conversation with you, and retailers face the same challenge every time a shopper walks in the door.  So how do the best of class CES exhibitors do it? 

Well most do it by throwing a ton of money at the problem and surprising you with a scale you wouldn’t expect.  “Hey the ceiling in here is made up of 100 65” LCD’s!”  And these kind of featured displays can be very effective.  They certainly worked for LG, Samsung, Kodak and others at CES.  The problem is that in a retail store where a customer might visit 12-50 times a year, the same $1M featured display that might easily catch their attention on the first visit, will not be so surprising or attention capturing on the 50th visit.  So in a retail store it’s usually better to use something other than extravagant investment to engage shoppers.

Microsoft used some inexpensive light projectors to put moving geometric patterns on fabric walls in their booth.  It cost a fraction of the Samsung display above, but both were equally effective and cutting through the visual clutter and capturing your attention.  The difference is that you can afford to change the Microsoft one every month to keep it fresh in your store.  You can’t do that with the cool but expensive Samsung approach.

Conclusion

It definitely felt like a more energetic show in 2010 than it did in 2009.  That’s probably partly because the economy is showing some signs of turning around, and partly because CEA consolidated exhibitors into a smaller footprint to feel busier.  There were a lot of good ideas at the show worth learning from, and it’s certainly going to be a busy and interesting year for CE Retailers!

I hope this recap is useful for those of you that didn’t attend, and I’d love  to hear what most caught the attention of those that did go.

Imagine my surprise when the Nordstrom salesperson told me “No.”

He went on to tell me that I could purchase that pants (without trying them on), they’d be shipped to my home and then I could bring them back to the store for alternations.

In my 25 year relationship as a Nordstrom customer, I’ve had items transferred numerous times, but it turns out that service is now a casualty of the internet era.

When I told the salesperson, if that’s my only option that I’d rather order them myself, he responded with a list of lame (and largely inaccurate) reasons why I should let him order them for me.  If I ordered them myself, I’d get to browse a larger assortment, get automated tracking info, and all my shipping addresses and billing info is already on-file making the transaction much faster.  But what it boils down to is that the salesperson wouldn’t get the commission if I ordered them myself.  So he was stuck trying to talk me into a worse customer experience.  Can that really be what Nordstrom intended?

People shop physical stores for the potential for immediate gratification, to viscerally interact with the products, and for the human provided customer service.  When you don’t deliver on those benefits, you fail!

Of course brick and mortar retailers should try and send shoppers to their on-line fulfillment rather than lose the sale, but that option should be considered a last resort when a retailer has failed to fulfill their brand promise, it should not be viewed as a customer benefit.

Last year Borders rolled out a new marketing campaign.  Giant posters appeared in the windows of all the stores, a greeter handed you a printed explanation when you walked in the store, and signs were prominently placed throughout the store.  What was this new policy?

“If we don’t have the book you are looking for in stock, we’ll send it to you with free shipping.”

Now, that’s a perfectly reasonable policy and I’m glad Borders has it.  But is that really the most important thing to tell shoppers that have made a special trip to your store?  Every customer’s first impression is going to be, “this store frequently doesn’t have what it’s customers are looking for, and I’d do better to just shop online.”  Followed closely by “wait… doesn’t Amazon have free shipping for most orders too?  Is Borders making a big fuss about adopting the industry standard practice?”

There are lots of great ways for Click and Bricks (multi-channel) retailers to leverage their advantages to better serve the customer.  But don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

It’s particularly ironic that many stores with a no photography policy are in the photo business.  Did you know that Apple retail has a no photography policy?  Apple must know that this kid makes music videos in their store using the store provided webcam and internet connection, and that these videos have over 1,000,000 hits on YouTube!  I’ve had a Apple store manager (politely) inform me that “technically we don’t allow photography in our stores.”  I asked him if he encouraged shoppers to try the cameras built into the dozens of laptops, phones and iPods in his store; of course he did!  It’s great that people want to play in the Apple stores, and Apple should be embracing that level engagement, not trying to stifle it.  Happily, very few Apple employees try to enforce this policy.

What if I’m using my camera phone to build a shopping wish list?  Am I allowed to take a photo of the movies available at the video rental store to send to my family member at home who is helping me pick a title for that night?  Many products now feature a 2D barcode on the packaging and shoppers are encouraged to use their camera phone’s to take photo’s of the code to be redirected to a mobile website for further info (such as the Microsoft Tag on many of it’s mice and keyboards).  Best Buy even puts QR codes (another 2D barcode) on signs in the store and encourages shoppers to use their camera phone to visit a a YouTube video that’s linked to the code.  I asked the BestBuy store manager in this particular store, and he sheepishly admitted that they too have a no photography policy.  Best Buy spends millions of dollars on display fixtures to make sure that shoppers can use all the demo cameras in the store.

I know that hard working retailers are not in love with the idea of their competitors visiting their stores and “borrowing” their best ideas, and I certainly appreciate the sentiment.  But frankly those unscrupulous  competitors are still going to get their shots, with or without a policy.  I would never steal anyone else’s intellectual property, but I do take thousands of retail photos for use in audits, lectures, blogs, etc…  I own a variety of stealthy photography tools, but I rarely bother to use them.  It’s simply not realistic to expect over burdened retail staff to be the camera police, when virtually every shopper that walks in the store has some form of camera or camera phone on them.

Shoppers that want to take photo’s in your store are your best customers!  Quite treating them like they are trying to steal your soul, and embrace the era of the social network.

What are your thoughts?