RETAIL’S TECH-LED REVOLUTION

Gaye-Steel

Gaye is an experienced marketing professional, having launched her career in marketing in FMCG working for a multinational Reckitt & Colman for 10 years, followed by stints at McDonald’s (as National Marketing Manager), Telstra and Church & Dwight. Gaye is now relishing the challenges of agency life in her role as Marketing Director for GuihenJones (retail communications agency). She is also an accomplished Academic Lecturer in Marketing & Advertising.

Story: Gaye Steel

“All of our innovations have been led by Australians!”

When a brand superpower like McDonald’s bestows an endorsement like this on the incredible innovations undertaken by brave Australian businesses, you know an important technological corner has been turned. McDonald’s Australia CEO Andrew Gregory uttered this phrase recently after opening what will surely become a historic new chapter of this iconic brand.

On one hand, it’s a case of a business simply moving with the times — the biggest brands, by rights, should be the first to react to technological advances that allow them to stay ahead of the game. But McDonald’s has been making a serving burgers in a particular way that many, many people have appreciated for many, many years. So change doesn’t happen lightly. But the digital revolution dictates that it must. I’ll outline what exactly the fast food giant is hatching shortly as we look at what brands, big and small, are doing as they design the stores of the future.

Maccers Serves Up Change: We all know McDonald’s is a global giant. The fast food pioneer created a never-seen-before customer experience and stuck to that winning formula for more than 70 years. So it’s a big deal when it decides to trial a revolutionary new approach. McDonald’s currently operates around 930 restaurants in Australia. The 1.7 million-plus customers they serve daily review, redeem and receive their meals that same way they do the world over. But this is a new world where shoppers are now using multiple channels — led by their mobile phones — to surf, compare and even purchase. That’s why Sydney’s Castle Hill restaurant has become a ‘Customer Learning Lab’ where hungry visitors can customise the brand’s world-famous burgers using advanced touchscreen digital kiosks to ‘Create Your Taste’. And this is just for starters. McDonald’s plans to roll out a further 10 Customer Learning Lab restaurants in 2015, with a mobile ordering app leading their research.

What’s in Store for Online?: McDonald’s is not the first to create concept store hubs, it’s simply leading the way on this side of the world. However, one pocket of Manhattan is breaking new retail ground and the rest of the world is watching. At a time when stores are closing as consumers migrate to online shopping, SoHo is becoming a hotbed of online stores doing quite the reverse — opening bricks and mortar outlets, all testing innovative new ways of doing business.

Best known as an online e-commerce site, Warby Parker sells eyewear but has no cash registers, no sales counters, precious few staff and limited storage space. Shoppers are free to try on glasses and even step into an onsite photobooth, upload snaps to their social media site to get the opinions of their friends on their new frames or print them out in Polaroid-like strips on the spot. If they (or their friends) like what they see, they jump onto one of the onsite iPads, order them online and have them delivered to their home about a week after the company is able to verify lens prescriptions. It’s an offline experience, onsite, and it’s one that is being repeated elsewhere.

Online jewellery retailer BaubleBar has embraced digital signage and established a pop-up shop of interactive touchscreens and digital kiosks. Shoppers use onsite iPads to design their own jewellery before having the final product created offsite and sent to their homes. Like Warby Parker, the store is designed to bring the engagement and conversion-driving features of the brand’s website to a physical retail environment familiar to the digital natives of SoHo. The innovative company uses the inexpensive pop-up store as a way to reach new customers that will then continue shopping with the company online after the store closes.

GAYE’S 5 TRENDS SHAPING FUTURE RETAIL

1. A personal shopper in your pocket: In-store technology like Apple’s iBeacon will deliver highly relevant and personal content directly to shopper’s mobile phones welcoming them upon entering a store, pointing out where their favourite products are and alerting them to deals and special offers.

2. B.I.Y: Buy It Yourself: When Apple suggests it, it usually takes hold! Its EasyPay self-mobile checkout is sure to become one of the biggest revolutions in retail for decades, allowing customers to locate, scan and pay for products without the need for a store employee to needlessly interrupt them.

3. Virtual changing rooms: Augmented Reality has been around for the last few years but has yet to really make an impact as flaws in this new technology are still being ironed out. However, it’s just a matter of time before the virtual world successfully merges with the physical world via consumers’ mobile phones and connected wearable devices, allowing shoppers to move through a store and seeing how they would look wearing something without actually trying it on.

4. Your shopping delivered from the skies: Admit it, we all thought Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was joking when he suggested ‘Octocopter’ drones would fly packages directly to shoppers’ doorsteps within 30 minutes. However, like Apple, when a company of Amazon’s status suggests something you can be sure you’ll be seeing it within the next few years.

5. Rise of the little guy: Millions of stores all selling the same products and constantly undercutting each other to the point of extinction isn’t sustainable. Expect to see a rise in smaller pop-up stores making and selling their own creations to their own fan base. Crowd-funding sites like KickStarter are already giving rise to the little guy.

A final word: One of the ways retail is different from other industries is we’re all part of it, either as consumers, suppliers, distributors or the retailer. The digital consumer is in the driver’s seat. So we’re not mere observers to these industry-morphing trends; we will all experience them first hand.