Four Reasons why an iPad won’t Meet Your In-Store Needs

In my last post, “Don’t Just Look: Touch” I discussed the continuing emergence of interactive merchandising experiences. Retailers are now seeing positive ROI providing rich branding experience through the use of lower cost interactive signage and cloud based content systems.

There are many considerations behind the creation of a successful interactive experience. You need to answer many questions to ensure the customer has a seamless and engaging brand experience. You have to ask: Who will design and manage the content? How will the device be affixed, powered and secured? Today, we will discuss the first question – how to select the interactive device.

Consumer devices are sometimes used for brand experiences. This is in-part due to the outdated perception that consumer devices are still the cheapest solution. Commercial technology has caught up, and now offers cost-effective purpose-built platforms for interactive brand experiences. This post highlights four considerations to make prior to purchasing a consumer (toy) device vs a commercial (purpose-built) device.

1. Physical security

How will the device be physically secured in a public access environment? A low-cost device that requires additional purchases of enclosures, cable security and mounting is no longer a low-cost device. Purpose-built devices can offer integrated mounting and physical security solutions. There’s no access to external ports and cabling for peripherals as they’re designed to be secure.

2. Operating System and application security

How often do you re-boot your refrigerator? Are you concerned if power is lost and how your fridge will restart? Of course not, it only knows to start as a fridge. The same can be true of your interactive merchandising experience. When power is lost, will it boot as an open web browser or unsecured OS with a START button to be converted to a solitaire gaming device? Operating system and application security are generally add-ons to consumer devices (i.e. additional costs, licenses to manage, and points of complexity). In my last post, we defined the term “appliance”. The value proposition for interactive computer “appliances” in 2015 is seamless management of retail experiences. These purpose-built devices accomplish the task of interactive merchandising without the complications of having to glue it together yourself.

3. Application / Content delivery

The term “sneakernet” has emerged to describe the prevailing way to deliver content to remote devices - literally walking store to store to deliver updates/applications. Marketing agencies started doing this because “this is how pop-up displays were done.” This is of course extremely inefficient. A better alternative is the use of low-cost cloud-based content delivery systems that can deliver content easily and efficiently without the enterprise IT overhead. The cloud also enables easy piloting of new content, near real-time measurement of results and immediate reporting of failing devices or devices needing attention.

4. Remote management of devices

One worst-case scenario for a retailer is a customer staring at a blank screen. If you’re leveraging content delivery via the cloud, you can also utilize remote management. To achieve the highest ROI, a marketer requires the ability to know the devices are functioning as intended. If the device isn’t functioning properly, the marketer is proactively notified of failures and is able to deploy a fix in real-time. The ability to update the underlying OS and leverage new libraries and functionality is important over the life of a campaign.

Have questions or want more information? Feel free to ask questions in the comments section or contact me directly at [email protected]. My Elo colleagues and I are “retail interactive technology experts” of sorts and would love to help make your installation successful.