Three steps to help brands connect digital content with in-store experience

RPM's  Head of Digital Strategy, James Poletti and Senior Shopper Strategist, John Viccars provide a 3-point guide on how to connect digital content with in-store experience.  

Brands are now adept at creating engaging digital content, but often neglect the integration of real world physical marketing such as in-store experience. Fortunately, emerging location-based technologies are helping to join the dots.

No longer a fringe sport, many brands now operate 24/7 digital content strategies, bringing audiences into their world like a media title firing the passions of readers across multiple publishing platforms. Think of the way Waitrose combines utility (recipes, shopping lists, wine matching) and customer publishing with its excellent iPhone app, all alongside magazines, vibrant social media communities and a YouTube (and now TV) channel helmed by celebrity chef ambassadors. Yet, Waitrose’s in-store content experience is a curiously "printed word" affair.

Where our digital and physical worlds align is, of course, mobile. According to L2 ThinkTank, mobile influence – not to be confused with m-commerce – is estimated to influence global sales of $689,000,000,000 by 2016. Plus, shoppers are increasingly using mobile in-store. A Cisco Study shows 8 out of 10 people already shop through "bits and bites". This existing and rapidly growing shopper behaviour is ripe for exploitation by brands. The opportunity is huge.

But there remains a disjuncture between shopper and shop in this behaviour. Hence the widely reported phenomenon of "showrooming", where shoppers jump online to find competitor pricing and recommendations. By treating showrooming as a threat, not an opportunity, retailers risk copying the music industry’s mistake of trying to stem an ultimately uncontrollablebehavioural shift.....

Click here for the full article, published on Marketing online. @rpmltd