Phygital Attraction

My cousin recently shared her shopping experience — she goes to a showroom, tries on the clothes, notes down the prices and size, comes home and purchases them online, at a much lower price. Great idea! Isn’t it? But it isn’t only the customers who are doing this. A retail brand too is encouraging its customers to visit the store physically, download its app while there, scan the barcode of the product they want to buy, choose from other options on the app, read customer reviews if they wish to and buy it online. 

In retail, this transaction is known as Showrooming, which is just one of the aspects of Phygital. The term Phygital, which gained popularity in 2012, is derived from physical and digital.

 The digital transformation kicked in early-1950s and brought along with it a new world of innovation. It was a paradigm shift and we took the leap of faith for the betterment of society, industries, processes etc. As convenient as it may be and as dependent as we may be on digital transformation, there are things that perform best in their original form, in their physical form.

We have come a long way when it comes to technology, yet it is important to take a step back and include the basics of physical into the convenience of digital. And Phygital adds the human touch to the digital journey in its most needed moments. Living in the times when our mobile phones have become an extension of our hand and connect our physical and digital worlds, this was meant to happen sooner than later.

Globalization has transformed the world into a global village and has brought businesses and people closer. The phygital phenomenon could potentially close the gap between the physical and digital worlds completely. It could change the way we think, the way we buy, and the way our society functions.

Other than retail, industries such as telecom, banking, airline, automobile and medical, among others have been using Phygital in various ways. Banks utilise it to deliver the omni-channel customer experience, airlines to deliver loyalty experience to frequent flyers, in retail, as mentioned, it is connecting the internet/mobile with the store/kiosk. This marriage of tradition with modern is meant to deliver efficiency, experience and ease, and also leverage innovation, marketing and strategy.

Phygital is a conscious call to make our lives better and more fun, while keeping the physical element alive — a win-win situation for all. Whether or not it will make as big an impact as digital transformation did, we can’t say yet, but for sure it is here to stay and for quite some time.

And understanding its importance and usage, we too have someone coming soon from the Phygital world. We call it vDeets and it’s the mobile application we have been working on for business cards. Trying the various digital business card applications, we realized that none could cater to the human touch that we were looking for, the one we are used to. Considering there are three main aspects of a business card — exchanging, managing and updating. The problem mainly lies in the last two areas, yet the applications available ignore the idea of actually exchanging business cards and the tradition attached to it. In many countries, physically exchanging a card is essential business etiquette. Anyway, you don’t want your client to shake hand with a bot representing you and vice versa. Do you?

Hence, trying to understand from a user’s perspective and incorporating the element of Phygital, we created vDeets.

Sign up as Beta user for vDeets.

We will be launching soon, until then enjoy Pokemon Go — one of the biggest phenomenon in gaming world, courtesy Phygital.