Retail Success With Smarter Analytics And Social Mobile Retailing

An article by Steve Lohr in Sunday’s New York Times explores the challenges and opportunities that an increasing array of consumer channels and purchase data is presenting to retailers.

According to Lohr:

Retailing is emerging as a real-world incubator for testing how computer firepower and smart software can be applied to social science — in this case, how variables like household economics and human behavior affect shopping.

From internal sources like point-of-sale and shipment-tracking data, web shopping data, social media awareness and engagement data or smartphone browsing, to macro consumer metrics like census data, the challenge to better understand consumption drivers across channels and devise strategy with all this data is great.  Retail analytics specialists like SAS Institute are stepping up to this challenge of helping retailers make sense of it.

The NYT piece also showcases an additional channel that I’m sure we’ll be discussing and addressing within the retail and digital spaces in the new year – social mobile retailing.  Interestingly enough, an article in Monday’s AdAge also identified this as a key opportunity cited by retailers for 2010.  Why should retailers better play with consumers in the mobile space – many of which are using their phones to comparison shop in store aisles?

According to AdAge:

One in five shoppers — and four in 10 of those ages 18 to 29 — said they planned to use their cellphones to shop over the holidays, according to an annual survey by Deloitte. Of those, 45% said they would be researching prices, 32% said they would be looking for coupons, 31% said they’d be reading reviews, and 25% planned to make purchases. It’s clear that retailers who don’t embrace mobile phone technology in the coming year will be left behind, much as those retailers who sat on the sidelines during the early days of digital or social media are now playing catchup.

Already, major players are testing out various facets of mobile technology.  JCPenney is testing a coupon-scanning program in 16 Houston-area stores.  Others, like Ralph Lauren, are experimenting with QR codes on their store windows.  And of course, iPhone apps are another foray into the mobile social retailing arena.  Among other examples is Wet Seal’s iRunway application for the iPhone.  With it, a customer in a store can browse for ideas by tag or trend, and can tap in an item’s ticket number — bar code recognition comes later this year — and see how it has been used in outfits that other customers have created online.

Clearly, the retail industry was one of the hardest hit by this year’s economic recession.  But smart retailers that continually seek to better understand how they can serve their customers across channels – and how they can engage with consumers that are already resourcefully deciding how smartphones and mobile factors into their shopping decisions – will be better prepared to stay relevant and find additional revenue opportunities this new year.

New York Times: “A Data Explosion Remakes Retailing”

Ad Age: “Planning Your Next Move in Ad Land”