New technologies at the service of trade marketing

Offline retailing has been changing rapidly in recent years, which has been in many ways accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. That is why shops in Poland less and less often look similar to the one I photographed some time ago in the Sudetes.

What determines the retail market now are rather the newly opened Amazon stores.

This one is located in Seattle. This is Amazon Go, where the entire sales process is managed by artificial intelligence coupled to the customer’s smartphone.

Now, this is Amazon Fresh in Irvine, California. If you are a customer there, you do not need to queue at the checkout, as you can use special trolleys that weigh and scan every item you buy.

In the years to come, such shops and the intelligent systems within them will set the standards that retail is aiming for.

The Polish trade is adapting to these trends very quickly, to the best of its ability of course. Note how quickly (in fact, within a year) self-service checkouts have broken onto the market. Nowadays, such things are nothing but a standard solution in Biedronka, Rossman or Super Pharma stores.

Please note that the sale of impulse products has been reduced to a minimum. All the comprehensive systems of shelves for candy bars, chewing gum and batteries, which used to be located at the checkout zones, have either quietly disappeared altogether or shrank to almost symbolic proportions. There are no longer any on the counter displays, dispensers or hangers for pouches with euro slots. There are no longer any goods recommended by the cashier….

Producers of the items that used to be displayed at the checkout must now reinvent themselves in the retail space. I do not envy them that.

However, this is not just POS systems that have evolved at an accelerated pace. Thanks to algorithms that recognise human faces and are coupled with cameras, we receive custom messages and it does not require much to work. All it takes is an accurate reading of the age and gender of a customer coming to the till.

In the photos below you can see that the camera in the vending machine correctly guessed my gender and is wrong about my age by 6 years only.

What is the result of that procedure? Well, the LCD screen on the front of this machine displays an advertisement targeted directly at me. Me, that is a middle-aged man.

Similar systems operate daily in Samsung showrooms. Through cameras installed in the display counters, an original algorithm controls the content displayed on the presented phones. Two parameters are also taken into account here, which is the gender and age of the customers approaching the counter. From these two parameters, you can generate as many as six groups of potential customers (a young man, a young woman, a middle-aged man, a middle-aged woman, an older man, an older woman). Strangely enough, this is a lot of data that you can use to personalise a message to purchase impulse products. According to Samsung’s research, this kind of carefully selected content that we see on the phone we pick up significantly increases the chance of selling it!

Dynamic messages displayed directly next to products have also quickly made their way into retail stores. Here, I am not referring only to digital signage systems in the form of “television” screens, which are already present in most chain shops. These have been rather standard promotional packages for some time now. 

What I am talking about is special rack ends that can come in a form of large LED screens like the one I found in a Portuguese hypermarket.

Unfortunately, I have not come across such a gondola development in Poland yet, although I believe this will happen shortly. Prices of the LED screen have recently decreased significantly. At present, the price of 1 square meter ranges only from PLN 3000 to PLN 4,000.

Mobile and eye-catching messages can already be installed at the shelf level. Then, it will be placed right next to the product. Small, shelf-size LCD screens were introduced in Carrefour by InstoreMedia. The first campaign using them was run in December last year. The new RedBull flavour was being promoted there. As far as I know, the next campaigns using these compact carriers can also be expected this year.

So, as you can see, technology is entering retail at full speed. No matter if these are advanced checkout systems or smart shelf-mounted LCD screens, the role of trade marketers is to observe them all and adapt them accordingly to what they need.