Part One: Store As A Media: How Can Brands and Retailers Truly Engage Shoppers?

The role of the store is changing. For success, differentiation and emotional connection with consumers is crucial.

In this episode of “To the Edge and Beyond,” host Maroun Ishac, Director of Business Development at Intel’s Internet of Things Group, talked with David Roth, CEO of The Store WPP and Chairman of the BAV Group, and Jay Hutton, CEO of VSBLTY. The Store tracks emerging technologies, purchase platforms, and physical formats that are changing shopping rituals around the globe. VSBLTY offers state-of-the-art software driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning. The trio explored the notion of the store as an advertising medium, branding use cases, and the many diverse partners and abilities it will take to make that concept a reality.

The pandemic has forced retailers and store owners to examine how they did business in the past and reimagine how it will be done in the future. Key concerns include how to creatively engage consumers and how to collect, analyze, and use data about their in-store shopping experiences. Ishac, Roth, and Hutton believe that the disruptions and changes brought about by COVID have paved the way for the new and faster adoption of technologies that will make creative engagement and broadscale data collection possible.

What used to be simply a distribution channel is slowly becoming a media channel, with the primary role of a store not being to sell products but rather to deliver the most emotionally engaging and interactive experiences possible, to develop and strengthen brand affinity and trust. Consumers can expect to see significant investment in digitizing traditional store elements like shelves, fridge, endcaps and displays.

But there’s still a long way to go, Ishac, Hutton and Roth talked about some of the infrastructure needed including alignment of technology with appropriate messaging, the right analytics engines to make sense of data and derive insights and staff that are wholly engaged in the process.

Stay tuned next week for part 2 where the trio discuss the ecosystem of partners and infrastructure needed to establish the store as a media channel.

Connect with Maroun Ishac, David Roth and Jay Hutton on LinkedIn

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