digital wellbeing labs » price comparison

The Last Click

agrunsteidl — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:00:41 +0000

Dixons’ browse-somewhere-else-then-buy-online-from-us advertisement campaign in London, is yet another indicator that business models for the high street have to change and will give rise to new retail formats. Stores with location overhead are competing with online retailers, who blatantly acknowledge that they depend to some extend on the services offered in brick & mortar stores, before attracting customers with competing price offers. Storefronts increasingly play a different role, which is less about actual transactions and more about brand driven customer relationship management.

With the advent, in the past decade, of fast and cheap broadband access for most of the UK population, the unacknowledged has become common practice. Most of us have been in situations discovering and trying products in shops on the high-street, or flipping through books in book stores, before searching for the best deal online. Many online retailers were implicitly silent about this behaviour whilst relying on this practice. Now for the first time, a company explicitly, although in a tongue and cheek manner, tempts potential customers to follow this practice. Dixons had to close or rename many unprofitable stores in the UK to Currys Digital in the past few years. As such they don’t have much high-street presence anymore. Instead their tag line has become “Dixons.co.uk The last place you want to go”

Naturally some high-street stores, who currently feel the effect of this practice are not too pleased.

Both Selfridges and Harrods have commented on the Dixons campaign. Both claim to be different by offering unique products and exceptional service in contrast to the Dixons online store. Although this may be true it is increasingly difficult for customers to choose between similar products whilst functional differences become negligible.

Online the debate about the Last-Click has been going for a few years, especially since AdSense and price comparison robots changed the rules of commerce. Recently companies like Google and Microsoft have recognised that users may visit many different sites in a chain of events that lead up to the final purchase click. In the current model the last click receives the full value of the the transaction, whilst persuasion to purchase or subscribe may have been accumulated through a succession of customer touch-points in the course of multiple sessions in as many days. This becomes increasingly an issue when driving communication about products and services into social media networks.

Various companies are developing tracking and measurement tools, which establish the value chain leading to the transaction and remunerate the facilitators accordingly. It’s a guess if Google and Microsoft are interested in this, not because of the ethical issues surrounding the current situation, but because they are worried that otherwise crucial links in the chain of events start missing. Mediators between producers and customers cannot afford consistently loosing out on their share, if dominant players keep grabbing it from them. If these mediators are removed from the chain it becomes harder for potential customers to get exposed and decide on a diverse range of products and services.

In fact in recent years advertisers increasingly demand quantifiable feedback to establish the effectiveness of a campaign and ensure ROI. These same mechanisms can be used to cut up the value cake and ensure that minor players can still fulfil a useful and worthy role in the retail customer relationship ecology. It’s possibly a way out of the dominance of the large brands and perhaps a route that makes the Long Tail actually work.

Our question is if it’s possible to merge these new online transaction-lead tracking tools, with customer touch points in the physical world. What’s missing is the possibility to uniquely trace a product purchase trajectory through the value chain. Some will argue about privacy and guaranteeing anonymity of the customers. Though customer loyalty cards, purchase vouchers and wish-list services exist already successfully in this environment, without necessarily having to compromise the individuals anonymity. The emergence of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) type systems should support these requirements whilst affecting at the same time the remuneration in this value chain. But that will be the basis for another article.

Relevant Links:

Dixons-the last place you want to go? | Marketing Week | Rosie Baker | 22 Sept 2009 | Discussion of the the effect of the campaign on the brand perception.

Dixons-the last place you want to go? |jkr |22 Sept 2009 |reflection on the style of the advertisement.

Harrods attacks Dixons’ ‘low-down’ ad campaign | Retail Week | George MacDonald | 22 September, 2009

Moving on the last click wins | imediaconnection.com | By Robin Davies | April 01, 2008 | both Google and Microsoft are looking at ways to measure beyond the ‘last click wins’ model

Location based services? barcode comparison? … and other disruptive ideas

agrunsteidl — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:21:20 +0000

Barcode and location based price comparison services, including augmented reality applications which overlay information on top of the physical world, are about to become mainstream. This will have a profound impact on business models in retail, will in the long run affect the way we conduct transactions in public space and will impact urban planning …

going shopping with a camera

Lets cast our imagination a few, lets say ten years forward. You walk by your local deli and your GPS enabled mobile phone, or some other piece of location aware wearable technology vibrates. A few days ago you agreed to dinner with friends and set a reminder on a service like reQall, to pick up a bottle of wine in the case you are in the vicinity of the shop. You walk into the shop and pick up a nice looking bottle. You scan the barcode with Redlaser and confirm that this is indeed a variety you might like based on previous purchases. Whilst you are glancing at an expert review of the bottle and compare the rating with an trustworthy online forum, you notice an alert that shows the prices and locations of nearby shops offering the same bottle of wine. It turns out that another shop down the road offers a three-for-two deal and you decide it is worth to walk the couple of minutes.

T-Mobile G1 Shop Savvy Demo

In this scenario the retailer who made the effort to inspire you to consider this particular bottle of wine, loses out on the deal. You’ve been to his store before, it’s in a convenient location, the store has a great ambience and on previous visits the staff seemed knowledgeable, but in the end the deal offered at the box selling warehouse merchant around the corner is too good to let go. For various reasons the deli on the high-street has to calculate higher margins to be able to offer the level of service that attracts customers, but is unable to compete once information on price is available freely. In German there’s even a term for this: “Beratungsddiebstahl”. Loosely translated as “Customer Advice Theft”.

This scenario can be played out with a variety of products in different markets. Retailers will consistently loose out on sales and have their customers pulled away, even if they offer better services, as soon as any unfavorable price differences exist. It’s not long before the shop offering additional service will have to close. Sounds familiar? In fact over centuries, changing availability and access to information, together with increasing mobility have been the major forces to alter the functional lay-out of our cities.

Actually this scenario is about to become reality much sooner. Most underlying technologies have been around for a while and many similar applications are expected to appear on iPhone, Android, Nokia and other platforms within the coming year.

More interestingly … I believe the above scenario will never become common place in the form described, as it becomes obsolete as soon as it is realized.

The resulting closure of shops in this scenario has unintended effects for the winemaker, affecting distribution and in succession the availability of his wine. This effect is already noticeable on the UK high street where a variety of stores are squeezed out of existence. (Sure the winemaker has the opportunity to sell his wine online, but that is a different story)

A BBC Click recently reported in an interview with a German games developer, as the amount of independent stores on the high street is shrinking, that smaller computer and console game manufacturers have diminishing opportunities to reach out to customers. According to the report less than 50 independent buyers for computer and console games are left in the UK. Smaller manufacturers find less and less outlets, few are able to set up their own branded shops and find it increasingly difficult to compete with large global brands both on and off-line.

One common strategy is to make products incomparable in retail. Companies will revert to old tricks, differentiating virtually the same product, lets say a compact camera called Gotak CS-y03 and the similar Gotak BS-09 to offer exclusive deals to different retailers. The cameras are virtually the same whilst the BS-09 includes a seldom used auto-smile-detection software feature, added on firmware level, allowing to price this product with a slightly different margin to remain competitive. A variety of similar strategies are deployed by manufacturers that produce multiple brands on top of the same product platforms to diversify margins for their retailers.

Drive by advertising

Lets look at a similar scenario, but from a slightly different perspective. Instead of the proactive case, having intentionally set a location based reminder to buy wine, we now have a more passive approach; contextual advertisements based on your location, time of day, weather, social context, your diary, mood and any other measurable patterns.

In a recent discussion amongst friends, we were talking about the soon to emerge widespread application of location based services, especially the common scenarios of GPS type location tracking together with geo-coded data. This will allow for example menus of restaurants to pop up on your mobile phone as you drive through the city, receiving alerts in the form of vouchers as you pass hotspots in synch with the preferences set in your profile. This will include time and location limited deals, offering selective access through coupons, to content and products available in your proximity. You can expect every few hundred meters yet another attempt to sell you some perfume or wet your appetite for the latest lunchtime pizza deal. You can easily picture yourself driving down your local high-street or approaching a shopping mall from the highway, being bombarded by the same Starbucks, Pizza Express, H&M, Footlocker ect messages on your phone.

We realized that many of these location aware scenarios anticipate a variety of choices from a diversity of retailers situated in brick and mortar locations, vying for our attention. Instead we will be seeing the same messages appear repeatedly on our mobile devices whilst we traverse our homogenized public environments.

Starbuck locations in central London

Or am I wrong and these technologies will enable retailers to compete again on a local level; shops can now be “discovered” away from the well trodden paths of the high-street pavements, disperse footfall to side alleys by pointing potential customers to walk “around the corner”. This might diminish the value of “location, location, location” and level the real estate prices, so independent shops can manage their margins on a more competitive level with out of town online warehouses? The high-street will increasingly become a proxy to the online world and we expect new types of retail hospitality type of environments to start populating the the spaces vacated by retailers relying on traditional transactions.

from Flickr group

Augmented reality applications

This is not an argument against the development and commercialization of these technologies. To the contrary we are excited about for example Augmented Reality applications, which currently start appearing on consumer level devices. for example Layar Wikitude by Mobilizy and Delicious Monster using registration barcodes on books. cds and dvds creates a seemless link between books owned on your bookshelf and online recommendations from Amazon. These technologies and affiliated services emerge as part of the evolving nature of our networked society. Many of these applications are being realized on a “can do” basis. Relatively cheap and computationally powerful mobile platforms are now sufficiently distributed in the population. Online access to rich geo-tagged databases is rapidly growing. The time is ripe for services to come out of labs and offer opportunities for many start-ups to grab a piece of a potentially huge market.

What will happen?

It’s not surprising that retailers wont be too happy with people holding their mobiles too close to products on shelves and will want to prevent taking pictures inside their shops. Currently many places forbid photography, citing the right to “privacy” of fellow customers. But how will shops be able to enforce this? “Checking” your phone whilst taking a picture and running a price comparison app is hardly detectable by security staff. It’s a lost game similar to the early days of digital cameras, when concert visitors were told to leave their camera’s by the entrance because of possible copyright infringement. Now, a few years later, we are instead encouraged to take as many pictures as we like and upload them as soon as possible to a Facebook fan page. In the long run we will need a way of dealing with a situation were many products, including digital spectacles and brooches, will have camera type technology build-in and continuously store and compare image data online. This will lead to a situation where brand outlets will be inviting people to publish as many pictures as they want, to demonstrate brand loyalty , whilst department type stores who aggregate products through buyers who negotiate purchase and sales prices with the manufacturers and suppliers, will want to avoid people comparing prices.

Price aggregator sites serve a self defeating purpose. Once a site emerges the price differences between comparable products will run down to bare minimum levels, just about covering margins to sustain the cost of warehousing and delivery. A situation only maintainable by companies operating on sheer volume . At some point most prices will become almost similar and the reason to exist, the very purpose of the site, makes itself obsolete.

What’s next?

Location based price comparison technologies, if applied straight out of the lab to the current retail environment, are plain naive from a business point of view. We can and will not be able to run them successfully for any length of time unless we develop radically different business models that take into account how products are introduced and exposed across all communication channels and customer touch-points.

The emergence of these technologies is is unstoppable. The effect of these will be different, in different geographic locations, none the less the impact will be profound. We need to reconsider business models considering new forms of pricing, sales strategies, haggling, financing and distribution. We will need to understand the role of up- and especially cross-selling in these new sales environments. It will affect how we will encounter public spaces in the near future and we better prepare for it. Already now many traditional retail typologies are vanishing from the high street e.g. The Bookstores, Music-stores, travel agents, electric retailers are all becoming extinct. I don’t believe we should keep these types artificially alive in a wave of nostalgia. Instead we should actively encourage projects that consider how pubic space will be affected by new technologies and how we can take this massive opportunity to design appropriate solutions around innovative business models. We should not make yet again the mistake of watching and condemning something like music piracy, in the mean time ignoring to develop alternative business and experience models that match the sign of the times. Whilst these technologies will have considerable impact on the way communities interact in the near future, politicians are probably still ignorant of what is emerging. Once we planned cities for cars, now we might require complete new approaches to urban planning, based on integrating brick and mortar with an overlay of the virtual.