The growth of our online existences – from conducting research through search engines, to social media, to online shopping – has created a world of information that marketers a decade ago could have only dreamed of. As our lives become more tied in and dependent upon technology, the volume of data that will be available to marketers will only grow exponentially. As our interactivity with technologies that can begin to predict our likes, dislikes, and even needs, turns into more of a dependency, aggregate data sets will flood spreadsheets, tables, graphs, like never before. The challenge for marketers will be to understand how to effectively leverage these predictive technologies and turn this information into useful patterns and trends that can help make them more effective at understanding their target audience, help give the consumer more choices that are relevant, and help companies become more efficient. I believe that this is a cyclical pattern that will eventually approach near real time. This is what I call “conversational marketing”, and I believe this future is close at hand.
I will cover this topic of Conversational Marketing more in the coming months, but for now the following paragraphs illustrate this direction I believe marketing is headed.
Thinking Ahead: Winning the Future of Retail
Recently I was at the National Retail Federation’s annual Expo in New York, a large conference and trade show for companies who serve the retail sector. Walking the aisles of the expo, one gets a sense of the direction of the future of retail. Mobile technologies, RFID, streamlined POS systems, data collection are fast making their way into our physical shopping experiences. What really struck me were those companies that were truly thinking ahead, who are making educated predictions as to the buying behavior of the consumer and the future of technology, and developing products based on this combination. One in particular stood out.
Developed by Cisco, the StyleMeTM Virtual Fashion Mirror is essentially a TV hung vertically, with which the user interacts much the same way that one does with Microsoft’s Xbox with Kinect control (Cisco is using a PrimeSense camera, the technology behind Kinect). You stand in front of the TV, in which you see yourself, and choose from a catalog of clothing that it projects onto your “reflected” image in the television. In this way, you can try out various combinations to see how they look together and how they might look on you. Mind you, if you want to see if those jeans really look good on you, you still need to get your butt into them and trust your close friends give their honest opinion.
The technology is still rough. The clothes don’t “fit” perfectly on your reflected image, and there is a delay between your movement and the clothes catching up. But it is useful, and fun. Cisco is rolling it out this year with partner stores John Lewis in the UK. Certainly they will be collecting voice-of-customer on this, from both John Lewis customers and in-store staff, and using this information to improve the product. I imagine that in a few short years, this technology will work as smoothly as it does in Cisco’s promo video (http://youtu.be/XM9ZOWPeiAk).
While this novel gadget may help bring some people back into the brick-and-mortar location, our attention span for gadgetry is fairly short if this technology is not convenient or useful in our daily lives. Going to a store is not convenient. I would say that the real potential of this technology is in the home. And while not everyone is interested in investing in an Xbox with Kinect, the PrimeSense technology that allows you to control your television with a wave of the hand – no remote required – will be quickly making it into your home. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show was ablaze with Smart TVs, most notably lead by Samsung (http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/11/samsung-smart-interaction-gesture-controlled-hdtv-demo-video/). HD is now ubiquitous; 3D is getting there, but limited by the production of content (and the required glasses are not convenient); internet connectivity and subscription services such as Pandora and Netflix are being incorporated into more screens. The next frontier is going to be the interactivity with the television, bringing together the motion control made popular by Microsoft’s Kinect, voice control popularized by Apple’s Siri (and Dragon software before), along with third party applications and the web. From making video calls (ala Skype or FaceTime), to having your emails read to you, to surfing the net, the future of this in-home (and also in-office) technology revolves around the convergence of all our technologies and toys.
Imagine five years from now you’re standing in your living room in front of the TV. On the screen is you, and you’re moving your arms around in a dance that brings up catalogs, clothes options, putting them on your reflected image, some moving to your shopping cart, snap shots being blasted to your Facebook friends to get opinions. Now let’s take this example even further and add in some of the concepts being developed by French company IntuiLab. You’re dancing in front of the TV, quickly scrolling through the retailer’s online product selection. At your “finger tips” not only do you have the store’s catalog, you have your own personalized catalog of your previous purchases from that retailer. You can now “try on” potential purchases in combination with purchases you have previously made (currently an idea incorporated into retail technology being developed by IntuiLab: http://intuilab.com/showroom/virtual-store-window-for-clothes/). Or if it’s getting close to the holidays, you have a virtual images of your family stored on the TV that you use to try different ugly sweaters on them, this time while laying back on the sofa, controlling the action with your iPad or other tablet. Taking it one step further, imagine a completely immersive, collaborative shopping experience where your friends are online as well, via Sype or Facebook, and they can “Like” or comment on outfits you’re trying out, and you can do the same for them. A group of friends can help each other and shop together, even if one is in Buffalo and the other in Boise (both places one may be more motivated to shop from home during the winter months).
Conversational Technology: A Marketer’s Overwhelming Dream
The amount of data marketers will be able to gather on overall tastes, preferences, trends, will be absolutely unprecedented. Popular combinations will be able to be used to construct dynamic catalogs based on real-time data. Think of iTunes “Genius Recommendations”, Pandora’s custom radio stations, or Amazon’s various “Recommendations”, only now it’s for apparel, with the recommendations model being updated as you try on outfits. Dynamic catalogs can suggest outfits, color combinations, sizes, shoes, etc. and users and their friends can simply give a literal thumbs up or thumbs down that their smart TV will read and communicate back to the retailer’s servers. Comparisons can be made across the data spectrum being collected, ala Netflix’ “Popular with Viewers Like You”, to include or exclude products from the catalog.
The interaction between the retailer and the consumer will move from the simple version of “interactive” we have today, to a more of a “conversation” between the marketer and the consumer. As fashion tastes can be unpredictable, the technology can simultaneously offer more choices while helping manage costs associated with this unpredictability. One particular segment of the market this may be particularly helpful with is the tween / teen markets. What’s cool today may be completely out tomorrow. With the power of tools such as these, marketers can gather the data to push back up the supply chain to help manage costs, and maybe even forecast up and coming trends.
Take this example of the tween / teen markets and the implication on costs savings from the data collection, and expand it globally. The large multinational retailers can use this “conversational technology” to track trends across various markets. Political borders, already disappearing, will be replaced with trend maps overlaid on geographical maps, helping predict which colors, sizes, and styles will be more popular in Mediterranean Europe as opposed to Nordic Europe, as compared with Central Europe. This data can help accelerate product development, creating more accurate sales forecasts, and dynamic campaigns. With the ever-increasing real-time, hyper-local data, the power of marketing increases, but the high-level marketing strategy becomes even more complex. While online shopping today provides a virtual plethora of data possibilities, the upcoming technologies will increase this exponentially.
While the marketing strategist part of me is excited, the consumer in me is impatient…I’m just waiting for true, holographic smart TVs that can scan our bodies and project the clothes directly onto us so we can see if those jeans really do make our asses look good, without actually having to change a thousand times. No more waiting for a dressing room, or ordering three sizes only to return two. Probably another 15 years, right about the time we’ll finally get flying cars.
