Mele’s Musings

Retailers Harness Digital Media for In-Store Experiences, Product Sampling

I will continue to bang this drum: digital media is not about media, it’s about experiences. 

photo from VentureBeat

Article excerpt: When it comes to retail spaces, marketers have perhaps the best opportunity to tie digital-marketing experiences to physical-marketing experiences. And marketers are experimenting with morphing circulars into mobile formats, implementing social media into in-store experiences and using technology to promote product sampling. In some cases, these technologies can be considered media in their own right.  “We’re very focused on the three categories of media: proprietary media, things they own like website customer lists; earned media, things in market where people are talking and acting as influencers, like blogs and message boards; and paid media. … But the metrics are difficult and internal structure of client and agency haven’t lent themselves to that,” said Trevor Kaufman, CEO of Schematic, who is working on setting up WPP’s digital capability for Dell. Mr. Kaufman was one of the members of a panel at this morning’s Ad Age Digital Marketing Conference titled “Retail in Detail: Where the Digital World Meets the Physical World.”
adage.com

Musing: As mobile technologies become more robust and reliable, the retail store will just be one more area where we are connecting digitally with friends, family, and the world wide web.  I was struck by two things in this article.  First is the ability to get instant feedback in store on products you are considering.  This completely changes the in-store experience, and begins to break down the physical store walls.  Stores will have a harder and harder time controlling what happens within their walls.  The second is the fact that brands are starting to realize that they are content creators as much as anything else they do.  The brand is not a slogan or an ad.  It is an experience – and that experience goes far beyond the purchase itself.  Whadda you think?