Popertee, X-Mode, and the Future of Retail
X-Mode is excited to announce our partnership with Popertee, the platform that is working to digitize physical spaces and transfer online analytics tools into the world of retail. Popertee aims to become the market leader in location intelligence, enabling marketers and retailers to target audiences and measure campaigns in the physical world.
I recently sat down with Lucinda Kelly, the founder, and CEO of Popertee, to discuss the changing identity of retail, as well as the role that Popertee and X-Mode have to play in this exciting time of transition.
According to Lucinda, what we think of retail will be completely different in the immediate future. “In five years’ time,” she said to me, “I don’t even see retail as a sales channel at all.”
That’s not to imply that retail will become irrelevant — far from it. “WeWork is a really interesting company,” she continued. “They changed the existing model, going from long term leases to temporary ones. Retail is following suit: It’s not about using a space to sell products that could be sold online. It’s about creating experiences, and creating communities.”
What Lucinda is talking about — experiential retail — is one of the hottest trends of 2019, and probably one that you are going to start to notice soon, if you haven’t already. In a February article for Retail Dive, different players in the emerging experiential retail field talked about how their business model was changing as people do more of their shopping online.
A Canadian clothing store called Roots opened a new location in Boston that was designed to communicate the company’s brand more than making sales. There were “1,000 socks” hanging from the ceiling, and other funky pieces of decor designed to “create an environment where people walked in and said wow!” Only a quarter of the space was designated for actual sales.
Where does Popertee enter into this trend? Lucinda told me that she has noticed “a lack of quality, granular data in retail.” Thanks to companies like X-Mode, this is changing, but there is still a gap in the data that retailers need. Popertee is working to bridge that gap, and in Lucinda’s words, “to take this newly available data and connect it with physical spaces for the first time.”
Here at X-Mode, we’re all about bringing innovative solutions to jump-start the future of business — that’s the philosophy that led us to develop our industry-leading SDK. After Lucinda reached out to us, we became excited to be a part of such a forward-thinking business model. We also knew that we could provide the kind of granular data that Popertee was looking for.
Another key element that brought X-Mode and Popertee together was our shared values, something that Lucinda brought up in our conversation. “Data compliance and privacy are very important to us,” Lucinda told me. “It’s at the center of what we do: all of our data is anonymized, aggregated, and fully compliant. We knew that whoever we worked with would have to align with our values in that area.”
Fortunately for the partnership, data privacy and security has always been a priority for X-Mode as well. This reassured Lucinda, and we knew that we would work well together. “With some of the players out there, I wonder whether they are actually 100% compliant,” she confessed to me. “But with X-Mode, I knew I didn’t have to worry about that.”
As our conversation wrapped up, the topic of GDPR and the future of data security came up. I asked Lucinda what her predictions were, and she told me that regulation on data privacy is only going to become stricter. But she isn’t worried about how Popertee or X-Mode will fare.
“There are some players in this space that are going to get into trouble,” she told me, “but I think that we are in a comfortable position. In the world of programmatic advertising and online analytics, which I used to work in, there is an inherent risk because you are dealing with personal information. What we are doing is measuring crowd behaviors, and there’s no way to reverse engineer that data that I know of.”
Popertee has come a long way, and they have a long road ahead of them still — just like X-Mode. It couldn’t be a more exciting time to be in Location, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be on this journey with so many other great innovators.
By: Joseph Green
