While many gallons of ink have been spilled on the magic of mobile in retail, there is actually a one word description that explains much of what mobile can do.
Access.
While the world of 1995 may not seem like a radically different place when we visit it in our memories, for retailers it was a different era entirely. There were well-defined access points to interact consumers at — television ads, print circulars, a host of tactics once they were already in store — and an accompanying reality that if consumers happened to be eating breakfast, commuting to work, standing in line at a store waiting to checkout, or were otherwise away from access nodes, they were for that time period essentially unreachable.
What a difference a couple of decades makes.
By the early 2000s, access had exponentially expanded thank to the emergence of the Web and the stunning realization that people who spent eight to 10 hours a day at work logged into the Internet might dedicate some of that time to shopping or preparing to shop. The explosion of social sharing platforms Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al in the late 2000s pushed the boundaries of that access even further by creating the Web’s “cruising grounds” where users checked in continually throughout the day.
But even at that, the physical world was still the physical world and the online world was the online world. It was hard to blend the two. The online world was accessed via a computer, either at the office or in the family room at home, and not exactly portable.
The game changer though, has been mobile. Mobile makes the blurring of the online and offline worlds possible, and new experiences for consumers and the brands and business they interact with possible.
And personal.
With all that access, naturally, comes the opportunity for retailers to want to use it to establish a two-way channel to not only reach those mobile-toting, always on consumers, but to make it personal. And, when it works, it works brilliantly.
When the Rolling Stones sang about a “mother’s little helper” in 1966 – they didn’t mean that in a nice way. Beacon technologists do, and they are very sincere in their efforts in 2015 to help turn smartphones into little helpers for mothers everywhere — and it looks like their chances to do so on a wide scale are looking up.
According to new research from beacon platform company inMarket and verified by comScore, 38 percent of millennial mothers can now be reached via in-store beacons. That almost doubles the 20 percent of all women in that age bracket, according to the report.
The report also found correlations between their beacons’ platform and a 14 percent increase in items put into a cart.
The information matters because millennial women are generally active spenders and at this phase are out-earning their male counterparts on the upper end of the income spectrum. Mothers as a group are always interesting to retailers since they control a lot of the spend in the U.S. – particularly when it comes to staple purchases.
However, the report is notable for the information it doesn’t include along with the information it does include about the size of the opportunity.
The report doesn’t actually offer any hard data on the effect that beacon ads or communications have on actually driving conversions. They note a correlation between presence and increased cart size, but they don’t draw a statistical straight line on how often young moms (or anyone else) move from a beacon ping to a purchase.
Mobile is full of these types of stories. There are lots of opportunities to ping phones and lots of players send out a wide variety of types of ping — emails, texts, apps, etc. — but not always a clear vision of what types of ping will work.
In recent years, “personalization” has been a point of crystallization for how those pings should look. Mobile devices are very personal and they allow retailers and the data analysts they employ to get a very up close and personal look at their consumer base. On paper it seems like it should be a surefire plan to use that personal data to really find a way to interact personally with customers on their phones.
However, in practice, this often comes across as very, very creepy. Mobile technology has offered many smart people an opportunity to learn that there is a fine line between “my merchant gets me,” and “my merchant is stalking me.”
The big flameouts are well known. Target got a little too personal with a teenage girl in 2012 when it started inundating her with coupons for maternity clothes and nursery furniture because their analytics correctly deduced from her purchase history that she was pregnant. Her father had not yet drawn that conclusion and was rather nonplussed to have found out from Target that he was going to be a grandfather.
In 2013 the normally tech-savvy Nordstrom angered its consumer base when it was discovered that the store was using Wi-Fi signals to learn more about customer traffic in a handful of stores. Though the data was aggregated, customers complained of feeling spied on, and the program was pulled.
And even beyond the realm of the big public misses, every consumer every day gets some variation on a personalization fail sent to their phone. Sometimes those fails are because the retailer just didn’t get who they were advertising to — and as such you saw an ad for something just inappropriate.
Mostly, though, research shows, the problem occurs when the software gets it right but keys into something the consumer doesn’t actually want to see advertisements for. People buy all kinds of things, but they are embarrassed by some of them and for those things they don’t want to see ads or any other indication that someone is watching them purchase them.
In short, when personalization misses, consumers find it creepy and invasive, which turns them off to the experience — and leaves a merchant running the risk of going from the possibility of infinite access to a certainty of none- because they just plain weirded out their customers.
In short, consumers want personalized experiences when they shop — they just don’t want those experiences to be too personal. And while that can sound like a rather fine distinction, it seems to be one that retailers are evolving toward as they refocus their efforts on relevance instead of personalization.
“We shy away from the word ‘personalization’ and focus more on relevancy, because personal can be, again, getting back to that creepy factor,” Mike Robinson, the executive vice president of digital technology, customer experience, and site merchandising at Macys.com, said in an interview with BuzzFeed News.
“It’s funny because people use the word personalization and I always use the word relevance,” noted Vice President of Customer Experience at Walmart Helen Vaid in a separate interview. “You have to give the relevant experience to the customers at that point in time, and it should be relevant contextually.”
The move toward redefining the “personal” experience toward relevance was also evident this week in the move by Lord & Taylor and Saks parent company Hudson Bay to revamp its website and email marketing experiences for consumers. Instead of shooting for more interaction, this tactic seems to be focused on greater relevance. A woman shopping for shoes and a man shopping for suits won’t see the same landing page, nor will either see the same landing page when they return to the site.
“The most relevant, targeted messages with products that are of interest are the ones that perform the best,” HBC Digital president Michael Burgess told The Wall Street Journal. HBC runs the eCommerce sites for Hudson’s Bay brands.
Consumers like seeing the right ad at the right time, almost as surely as they hate seeing the wrong ad at the wrong time. Mobile gives retailers the power to do the former far more often than they ever have in the past. But that power comes with risk; they can also do the latter far more easily than they could have in the past as well.
So maybe the smart retailer doesn’t really want the experience to be personal after all — just relevant. It might not go as right, but at least when it goes wrong the customer doesn’t take it personally.
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