Dive Summary:
- To combat e-commerce's price and product availability advantages, brick-and-mortar retailers will have to transform the in-store experience.
- Several startups are building tools to help physical retailers build a new "experience" economy around mobile devices, with mobile loyalty apps like Shopkick granting customers points for walking into a store and capturing, processing and delivering information to customers as they look around.
- Shopkick CEO Cyriac Roeding believes recreating the personalized shopping experience destroyed by big box stores is necessary, and that the smartphone is the key component if physical retailers hope to compete with Amazon's ability to suggest products based on recent purchases.
From the article:
... “The changes in the next five years in retail will be more profound and transformational than the last 100 years in retail have been because largely because of mobile,” Cyriac Roeding, CEO of Shopkick, a mobile loyalty application that awards points to consumers who walk into stores, told me in an interview. “I don’t think people will go because they need something. I don’t even think they’ll go because they want something. I think they’ll go because they want to feel better.” ...
