Making Brick And Mortar Stores Seem More Digital

from the analog-merging-with-digital... dept

Brick and mortar retailers are waking up to the fact that they're competing against online retailers, and are now doing plenty of things to try to make the in-store shopping experience better or to merge the two, in yet another example of how the analog and digital worlds are merging. The latest can be seen in plans by Circuit City to really change the way they handle selling products to customers. On the web side, they want to go beyond "buy online, pickup at the store" (which they already offer) to "buy online, have a Circuit City employee, wearing Circuit City clothes in a Circuit City van deliver the product to you." Even more interesting, though, is the idea of handing out a set of headphones to every customers who walks in the store that tracks their locations and feeds them additional info about products, offers special promotions and can connect users to a live sales representative. That's right, rather than having an in-store employee tapping you on the shoulder to see if you found everything you were looking for, that sales person may be completely virtual or possibly based in a call center halfway around the world. Obviously, if you don't want that, it's pretty simple to agree not to put the headphones on at all. What's more interesting, though, is to take this concept one step further. Why do you need Circuit City's headphones? Why not do it over your mobile phone, and have it be sales people at a different store with offers to entice you to buy from them instead. Or, even, a comparison shopping service that can tell you that if you leave the Circuit City right now and go to Best Buy down the street, they'll promise you a 10% discount on that TV you're looking at. Obviously, the store owners won't like the idea of a "competitive" sales person in the store with them, but it's hard to see how they'll ban all mobile phones in their stores without losing a lot of customers.
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  • identicon
    nonuser, 18 Jan 2005 @ 7:41pm

    chain store jockey

    My local Virgin record store has a disc jockey who calls attention to featured items in between music cuts, sort of a twenty-something version of "Attention Kmart shoppers". Now that gets expensive but maybe Circuit City could have one guy for the entire chain - but instead of talking up displays in one particular store, he can talk about sales trends as they happen in real time, like "Looks like the new LG phones are moving in our Manhattan stores. Our 43rd street store sold twelve of them in the last two hours, better than any other phone. Maybe that's because they allow video chat AND come in a slick clamshell package..."

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Ed, 19 Jan 2005 @ 8:47am

    Circuit City Delivery Vans

    ...because Webvan.com was such a roaring success.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      haig, 19 Jan 2005 @ 1:19pm

      Re: Circuit City Delivery Vans

      webvan was a miserable failure because they tried using a centralized hub-and-spoke distribution with one central warehouse per large area and vans delivering from their to each resident.

      An alternative to this is being done by incumbent shopping chains with success because they don't need to spend obscene amounts of money creating these super distribution warehouses, they simply use the same store people shop at as mini warehouses and deliver locally.

      Circuit City is following suit. Whether it's a huge success or just another incentive, if it helps why not.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        Anonymous Coward, 19 Jan 2005 @ 4:41pm

        Re: Circuit City Delivery Vans

        Anyone ever heard of UPS ?
        They can deliver just about anything from any store anytime.

        This story is lame and so are these new marketing ideas.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

  • This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
    identicon
    sesss, 29 Nov 2006 @ 6:40am

    fg

    ur shite

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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