Walking through the cold aisles
The risk of virtual
Brick and Mortar retailers are rushing to match their online counterparts with virtual mirrors , virtual catalogues, virtual vending machines, virtual payments, virtual merchandise, virtual et al. The obsession with virtualizing everything stems from a flawed outlook — that of looking at retail as just a transaction.
Replicating the online experience will not even the field, but will make brick and mortar retail lose its uniqueness.
Despite the hype, online constitutes only a little more than 6% of total retail volume today. Online retail even at its best is a very clinical/detached experience. Clicking through rows and columns of product images is nowhere as sensorially enticing as walking through the aisles, touching and feeling. Shopping has therapeutic implications for our lives. Consumers are hard-wired to seek out the sensory experience. They may not realize it, but convenience plays only a secondary role in many situations.
The placebo of retail
There is a much larger process of consideration and self reflection behind walking into the store and picking the products we like. Acquiring things in day-to-day life is part of our constant endeavour to evolve the self image. Much like what sociologist Ervin Goffman argued in his work, we live inside social conformities built by several factors including media and people in everyday life. So a customer buying a pair of trousers is not just picking the products she likes, but trying to visualize how she would look and be perceived at a party, standing next to a bar, or while walking through the aisles of her office. Her self image is built over days, months and years — equally contributed to by the sharply dressed executive she noticed in a conference, her favourite character in a movie and the girl in the magazine ad.
It is not about flicking through a product catalog till we find the one we like, but it is more of a creative mood boarding activity, where we are mentally piecing together several swatches to build the self image we want. This is not limited to fashion. When we buy phones, we are visualizing how the camera would work while taking a picture at a get-together, or how the battery would last when we are travelling. When buying a furniture, the image extends to the room. When we are buying an organic food item, it is about a larger social movement.
Big data in the aisle
If all we are trying to do is try to mirror ourselves from a societal montage that we collect and curate over time, maybe walking through the aisle of a retail store should be like walking through a magazine — helping us reaffirms our self image.
Can walking through a home furnishing store be similar to clicking through Apartment Therapy? Can an apparel store morph itself into Vogue? Can buying food be transformed from just picking it up from a freezer to finding the perfect welfare lifestyle? The web has created a searchable human collective consciousness. We are constantly documenting what we as a society stand for and feel. Customers are tapping this collective consciousness. You will see people hovering around with smartphones constantly checking what the world thinks. What if we can tap this boundless documented resource to interpolate the imagination of customers when they are walking through the aisles?
We have been experimenting with “big data in the aisle” at Moonraft. One of these experiments has been personified as VERA, a contextual shopping assistant and experimentation platform that lets customers visualize their latent desires related to how they want to be perceived. When a customer places a garment on VERA, it visualizes how that garment can contribute to looks that are trending today, almost as if the customer was looking at the garment in a fashion editorial. VERA works as an artificially intelligent brainstorming partner which has the awareness of the internet. It pulls out these recommendations and possibilities by looking at all fashion-related social data, blogs, forums and expert opinions and trends online, identifying top looks and helping the customer imagine how she would look. The idea is to let customers toy with possibilities of their future self rather than making them feel like consumers walking through a warehouse.
This potential extension of self is not limited to fashion. A smart surface concept we conceived for retail environments lets customers choose the most appropriate smartphone with the help of social data being aggregated at real time at the point of purchase.
Training an army of sales personnel who are equally passionate about the ever-evolving fields of fashion and technology is an uphill task. Contextual digital interventions can therefore be monumental in terms of satisfying the emotional needs of customers. Future brick and mortar retail stores will have to serve as destination for research & personal reinvention, catering to the informed customer. In a few years, today’s stores which are not much more than glorified warehouses of consumer products would have already vaporized to the clouds.
