Personalizing the Store Experience

Of all the real-time use cases for people-measurement, none is closer to my heart than personalization. I started my career in direct mail back when people first started using laser printers so they could begin letters with “Dear Gary”. And let me tell you that even that, back in the day, made a difference. Personalization creates a better experience.

Every one of us likes to feel like an experience is ours. We’d all rather be Norm coming into Cheers (where everyone not only knows but calls out his name). We also like it when an experience is tailored to us. An experience that reflects our unique interests and tastes will always feel more useful, responsive and enjoyable. Better experience is always a good thing, but personalization also drives improved sales performance. It just works, and that’s no surprise. Show a shopper a product they might want vs. one they don’t? Every bit of friction you remove from a purchasing system helps. Every time you make a decision easier or call it to mind, you make it more likely. That’s what personalization does.

In-store, though, personalization has been very hard. Even compared to “way back when” in direct mail, personalization of the store experience is a challenge. And when you compare personalization in a physical location to digital, the difference is profound. Digital is, by light-years, the easiest channel to personalize. Every aspect of personalization in the store is harder. It’s harder (and more expensive) to get the measurement. It’s harder to personalize the experience (you can’t change displays or move product around the fly). And it’s harder to A/B test your changes to see if they work.

Yet the pieces for in-store personalization are beginning to fall into place. Measurement may be more expensive in the store, but our current-generation of measurement systems deliver journey measurement that is fully equivalent to what you can do in digital. We measure everything a visitor does. Where they go. What they look at. How much time they spend. And we deliver all of the information to a decision-engine in true real-time. What’s more, unlike other kinds of testing, in-store personalization can mimic digital A/B tests. You can turn the personalization on or off by visitor and measure the downstream impact. That’s remarkably similar to what you can do in digital. And it’s the one area of store measurement where true A/B testing is possible.

But what can actually personalize?

That’s the key question when it comes to location-based personalization. Because unlike digital, where every aspect of the downstream experience is at least theoretically customizable, only a small set of things can be effectively customized in the physical world.

At the top of the list is video content and digital display. Digital display has become a commonplace in many physical locations. Stores use digital display extensively. It supports better content and richer content mixes than traditional display imagery. But just as on the web, digital display provides excellent opportunities for personalization. It’s obvious that a digital display could support personalization, but the real beauty of a lot of digital displays is that they are typically run by fairly sophisticated video management systems that provide easy access to customization. In fact, a decent percentage of digital display is controlled by digital first CMS systems from vendors like Adobe. Those systems already support everything you could possibly need to personalize (except the physical journey measurement which we provide).

With a good digital content management system, we can use everything in a visitor’s past behavior to drive content selection in real-time. For retail stores, that means we can select content based on specific products a shopper engaged with. Did a shopper look at skis or bicycles? We can select a video highlighting those products or related ones (e.g., goggles or helmets). We can use inferences from shopping behavior to refine content choices at higher levels. Did the shopper spend time in men’s collections? We can use that information to tune model or content selection. We can even use the shopper’s walking velocity to gauge the relative interest a shopper has in areas they didn’t shop but only passed through.

With extensive digital display customization, you can deliver in-store customizations that mirror many of the most successful digital personalization techniques. Product and category re-marketing based on interest, segmentation-driven content choices, and appropriate model/theme selection.

There are even opportunities here to use generative AI to custom-build personalization’s on the fly. That’s a rare case of something that would be much easier in store (with commensurately lower volumes and more time) than online.

I’ve focused on retail personalization, but it’s worth noting that similar digital display personalization’s are available elsewhere. If you want to customize screen displays in an airport based on which gate a passenger came from, you can do it. That gives you the potential not only to optimize the landside retail experience but potentially the whole passenger experience. You can tune the language and messaging of customer information dynamically based on passenger origin or gate location.

While digital content might be the easiest and most common type of personalization, it’s not the only personalization possible. Location behavioral histories can be delivered onto Associate devices, for example, so that employees interacting with a customer can have a complete record of what they’ve looked at. You can even couple this data to a recommendation engine so that the information given to the Associate is boiled down to 1 or 2 top recommendations to surface.

It’s also possible to replicate and improve what current PoS systems do in couponing. It’s common practice to give shoppers coupons related to items in their basket. But how much better would it be to give shopper’s coupons related to items they browsed but didn’t buy?

Although personalization isn’t exclusive to retail, there’s no doubt that the most obvious personalization opportunities are store focused (though I’ll note that we have done a little bit of museum work and I think the opportunities for personalization in museums are exciting). That just balances things out a little since most of the automation opportunities I discussed in my last post apply to bigger, more complex facilities than a store.

There are interesting people-measurement and real-time monitoring opportunities in all sorts of different industries and location types. They just aren’t necessarily the same!