The Intersection of Retail, Technology and Globalization
Yuka Ghesquière Nakasone, Globalization and Localization Director, Beabloo
Every aspect of modern life is undergoing a digital transformation. Where we once visited video rental stores like Blockbuster for entertainment, we now use digital streaming websites like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video to keep up with the latest movies and TV shows. More and more food delivery apps like Seamless, Deliveroo, and UberEATS are reshaping the way we order takeout, and companies like Booking.com and Airbnb have changed the way we book our vacations. The retail sector is no different.
When we hear about Amazon buying Whole Foods or learn that famous retail chains like Toys “R” Us are going out of business, it seems like e-commerce companies are taking over traditional retail. However, this is far from reality. In 2017, e-commerce sales made up only 10.2% of global retail sales. Although this number is projected to reach 17.5% by 2021, it is still just a fraction of total retail sales.
Even in trailblazing tech countries like China, online sales only account for approximately 20% of all retail sales, with a projected figure of 33.6% by 2019. It is clear that if retail companies around the world want to succeed, they need to continue to focus their efforts on the offline shopping experience while keeping up with the new innovations of the digital transformation. To make the situation a little more complex, customers are already operating seamlessly in the online and offline worlds, whether companies can keep up or not.
For example, some customers go to brick and mortar retailers to touch products and try them out before buying them online, while others will browse products online to see what is available before heading to a physical store to make their purchase.
In extreme cases, customers will look up products online while they are in the store. These new consumer behaviors are making old business models obsolete, so companies need to innovate or they will die. Advances in technologies like artificial intelligence may seem like something out of science fiction, but it truly is the future of retail. By adopting these innovations and adjusting business strategies, companies can join together online and offline shopping processes to provide new experiences to their customers and revolutionize the way they do retail. One way to look at the current state of retail is what Salesforce and Deloitte refer to in a recent report as the “Retail Renaissance” (Deloitte Digital (2018). Consumer Experience in the Retail Renaissance). Instead of seeing changes in how modern customers are behaving as a “retail apocalypse,” companies need to start embracing these disruptions. Change can be difficult for offline retailers that have operated the same way for years, but it is actually a very exciting time for the retail industry. Human beings are conditioned to see situations in black and white, yet the digital transformation is more complex than that.
Thanks to new technologies, companies can leverage the digital transformation to get the best of both worlds and make the most of the grey area in between. Instead of seeing e-commerce and brick and mortar as enemies, new retail technologies can help each to evolve and come together to create a new retail paradigm. Beabloo aims to usher companies into this “Retail Renaissance” with our Active Customer Intelligence Suite (ACIS), a comprehensive toolbox of customizable solutions. This collection of resources helps businesses digitize advertising campaigns, connect digital channels, analyze online and offline customer behavior to generate insights and many other features that make the customer journey more enjoyable and convenient. ACIS solutions use Beabloo’s cloud-based omnichannel content management system (CMS), which makes implementation easy for companies. We have also been developing various solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify tedious and complicated tasks. For example, the Minerva solution can be used for marketing and stock management. Minerva can be integrated with stock management systems and use data on what products are in stock to focus on advertising items that are underselling. It also uses this information to automatically change the frequency of different messages displayed on digital signage screens to optimize sales.
Globalization will be more important than ever for retail companies while they undergo a digital transformation. Once you are digital, you are global, meaning that once you put content on the Internet, it can and will be seen by people from all over the world. This is great news for international business, but it is a challenge to make sure your content speaks to a global audience. Global branding works best as a sum of local branding efforts, not as a rigid global branding strategy enforced by the headquarters’ marketing team that may not understand important cultural differences between their branch locations.
Our cloud-based solution can address this challenge better than other content management systems on the market. It coordinates fragmented communication channels by easily managing organizations with various child organizations across different locations. Content from all over the world can be connected, which makes localization quick and easy for the local marketing teams. The HQ marketing team will also benefit from a coordinated and centralized content management system. Beabloo’s omnichannel marketing platform enables companies to effortlessly become truly global.
Another exciting trend for globalization is the rise of voice-activated technology, such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, Line’s Clova and so on. These kinds of solutions make it easier for people to get information by simply asking questions out loud, which can be more efficient and comfortable than writing or typing a request. Why not implement voice technology in a retail environment? Beabloo has developed Halo, a chatbot that customers can talk to and get responses from in natural language to learn more information about products, services, sales, offers and more.
This is an intriguing AI technology application for retailers, but it does pose a problem for locations with an international clientele. In a city like Barcelona, where Beabloo has their headquarters, visitors and shoppers come from all over the world. Is it enough for a chatbot in a popular store to only have English and Spanish voice recognition and response capabilities? Probably not! But how many languages do you need? The biggest challenge we are facing right now is how to detect the language a customer is speaking, or otherwise predict what language might be best for them. There are many more questions surrounding voice recognition technology that will be the work of tech globalizers for years to come.
This article first appeared in VTQ Magazine.
Read more: https://vtqglobal.com/
Company
Beabloo is a Barcelona-based technology company founded in 2008. Their technology platform helps clients successfully navigate this tumultuous period of digital transformation in the retail and e-commerce sectors. Their product was recognized by Goldman Sachs in the summer of 2017 as one of the key technologies for the future of retail. What makes Beabloo unique from other retail technology companies is their Active Customer Intelligence Suite (ACIS), which encompasses a wide array of fully omnichannel solutions offering 360 degrees of customer behavior analytics and personalization, truly embodying the concept of O2O (online to offline and offline to online). It is rare to see such comprehensiveness in today’s market when we talk about retail technology. They are also investing heavily in research and development around artificial intelligence to keep themselves at the cutting edge of what’s possible today. Thanks to their solutions’ remarkable scalability, they serve from small, family-run neighborhood stores to giant multinational chains with hundreds of store locations around the world.
Yuka Ghesquière Nakasone
A passion for languages and foreign cultures, a love for technology and an insatiable curiosity have made Yuka Ghesquière Nakasone, born and raised in Japan, a localization specialist. Starting out over two decades ago at a localization startup in Massachusetts, USA, now one of the world’s localization giants, she has worked at every level of the globalization industry: buyer, MLV, SLV and freelancing, as well as in many verticals. In the retail industry, she has experiences outside the usual localization process. She helped the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce extend the portfolio of their Retail Tour by creating and executing the first Tokyo edition in cooperation with a local retail consultant in 2008. From that point on, she has been in constant contact with retail professionals and communities in Catalunya to follow the latest developments in retail. Yuka now leads a truly borderless life, combining her very international work as the globalization and localization director for Beabloo, which operates in more than 20 countries in the world, with the pleasure of the Spanish way of life with her own small Franco Japanese family in the Barcelona area of Spain.
