The future of Retail under moonlight

Wow, last night’s segment on Nightlife with Tony Delroy on ABC Local radio was a hoot.

We stripped back the hype, doom and gloom to take a look under the hood to see what is really going on with retail to discover that we are living through an evolutionary phase, like many industry’s across our planet, in which new elements of purchasing and retailing are emerging such as online, and as we transition through this we are experiencing the usual change mentality of “in my day this would never have happened” and “the world as we know it, is over”.

We will have casualties in this journey and nothing good can be made of that, but we will also have new heroes and experiences come out of it and in a few years this brave new retail / consumer world that we are building will seem ordinary and the way we used to shop will be another folk story we tell our children.

Online retail, even in the most ambitious statistics, is set to only account for about 15% of all retail purchases in the next 10 years, this leaves much buying and selling to be done in a physical store and in this newish world, the physical store will still account for the majority of retail experiences, but within that store there will be totally new expectations and interactions.

We are currently taking our first tentative steps into this new retail experience with mobile device apps, QR (quick response codes), NFC (near field technology) and in store technology such as magic mirrors.

Consumers will come laden with these new technologies, at first in their mobile devices and then beyond into other devices and discreet objects they carry on or with them as well as new in-store technologies. They also come laden with information, insights and prejudices provided by their online social networking tribe.

We are also seeing crowdsourcing websites such as groupon, scoopon, catch of the day and many others that have an initial flurry of excitement and success and are now having to rebuild their business models and broaden their offerings for long-term sustainability.

We also put shopping into context to see it as an 8 stages process, only one of which is the actual purchase, and that it is the way the consumer travels through these stages, using a blend of traditional and virtual engagement, that is changing.

We also chatted about the changing consumer, consumption patterns, global / national / local markets, bespoke and hyper-personalised purchasing.

A tonne of interest and great questions from our many call in listeners, so all in all a great interview and well worth a listen if you want to make sense of what lies ahead in retail (47 minutes):

Now for my next mobile computing trick….

Our M.C.’s (mobile computers and phones) have come a long way since my first $4,300.00 brick in 1988. Not only in technology and computing power, but in its sheer intrusion in our daily lives.

The resounding comment back then was it’s a fad; it will never catch on; it’s too expensive and really nothing you have to say and nothing I have to ask you is so important that it can’t wait till you get to a land line.

Fast forward to today and we have an Australian population of 22.3 million and 24 million connected handsets.

We already know that today’s mobile phone is far more powerful than the computer that launched us to the moon in the 60′s, but the innovation, purpose and new frontiers are all still ahead of us.

Jason Jordan of Perth’s 6PR and I in our weekly segment had a look over the near horizon of mobiles and chatted about NFC and QR code technologies.

NFC – Near Field Communication – has been on the cards for a while, but is now just about to hit. It is the ability for our mobile devices to set up gateways between ourselves and others and share information and payments, the best way to comes to terms with it, is it to take a quick look at this video.

NFC will be hard wired into new mobile phones within the next 6 months and with some certainty will be a feature of the next iPhone released.

Banks and credit card providers are also pushing hard on bringing this to reality as everyone has a financial stake and incentive in shifting forever the paradigm of technology expense and ownership onto the consumer.

And consumers, once they get used to it, will find it a boon as they use one device for their keys, wallets and communication – the Swiss army knife equivalent of managing most of our day to day affairs in one little handy carry in your pocket device.

QR codes are the other short term new mobile phone toy. It looks like a bar codes on steroids. To activate it download a free QR code reader from your app store (I recommend I-nigma).

This app turns your smartphone’s camera into a QR code reader and allows you to take a picture of the code and for the smartphone to automatically call up the web address and show you its contents – think of it as the mobile phone equivalent of getting a URL in an email, when you click on it it automatically takes you to whatver the sender wanted you to see.

For a really interesting example take a look at how Tesco in South Korea uses it to sell groceries to travellers waiting to catch their trains:

For more on this topic, listen in to this weeks segment:

and listen live each Sunday at 4.40 p.m. (WST)

6PR Big Weekend – FutureTech Segment – Calling Jesus – 26 December 2010

Jesus has just knocked out Angry Birds in the fight for the most downloaded app. It is available across 8 mobile platforms and has had over 12 million downloads in 2 years.

This free interactive Bible app from Life Church has taken the virtual world by storm with 4 billion minutes clocked up already by its users reading the new testament and in Dec 2010 through Jan 2011 there on track to achieve 1 billion minutes of bible reading – now there’s a business apportunity, just waiting to happen!

We also went on to chat about supermarkets self checkouts, NFC (near field communications) coming to a credit card and store near you and Skype app’s imminent arrival onto iPhone 4.

This plus some post Christmas merriment and great conversation make up this week’s on air radio chat between 6PR’s Ted Bull and Morris Miselowski.

Listen now:

Checkout the Future on MTR and 2GB

Checkout this on air chat between Scott Pape (the Barefoot Investor) and me on radio MTR and 2GB this evening. It was a conversation about the increase use of self checkouts at supermarkets and the future of in store promotion and purchasing.

We chatted briefly about the rise of the self checkout over the last 2 years and how it now accounts for 40% of all grocery checkouts across Woolies and Coles, with Coles having 100 of their 395 stores converted (the remainder will be up by 2012) and Woolies having 1750 self checkouts across its 365 stores, before I took what I think was a step too far.

We went on to talk about in store promotion and whispering into the consumers ear through 100% opted in, chosen and downloaded MC (mobile computer) apps that feed real time real place information about selected products, specials, store activities and item locations, this definitely pushed the wrong buttons and for the first time ever the interviewer ended our conversation with “thanks for your insights, but I hope none of your predictions come true”.

Curiouser and curiouser!

Is in-store hyper-personalized absolutely 100% opt in (and therefore 110% opt outable – or you could just turn off or ignore your mobile computer) the devil incarnate, or is it finally a way for us to filter all that marketing and promotional deluge we are bombarded with everyday right down to the bare bones of what we want to hear and know about.

Anyway, I’d love your thoughts…

Listen now: