Articles

According to recent reports, there are 1,68 billion active mobile social accounts (23% penetration worldwide and 46% penetration on mobile phone owners). Additionally, only a 25% of the installed mobile apps are used, mainly for socializing, communicating and gaming. Mobile social media appear to be the key communication channel for retailers, brands, and service providers. Shoppers and passengers will receive the right message on the right, their preferred and daily used, channel.

Technology and Innovation are rapidly transforming the face of business for retailers. On the other side, the consumers’ demand for convenience and immerse shopping experience will drive retailers to quickly adopt digital strategies that can increase revenue, reduce costs and deliver differentiated brand experience. That will definitely include the incorporation of IoT technologies.

We live in an era of messaging destruction that led to the age of indifference. Marketers worldwide were enthusiastic when they realized how easily they could reach their customers with their digital messages, but suddenly they understood that anyone else could also reach the same audience with the same easiness. We are bombarding consumers on a daily basis with a bunch of promotions through all available channels, traditional and all kinds of digital, but now they are paying very limited attention.

The digital revolution has a major impact in changing market landscapes and brands now face various challenges when planning their strategy due to the shifting shopping behavior of their customers. As contemporary customers are becoming more sophisticated and demanding the identification of the path to purchase has become a rather complicated process. Companies need to keep pace with this intensively shifting behaviors and adapt strategies able to cater to these new habits:

As the retail landscape is rapidly changing, more and more brands try to keep pace by adopting new ways of communicating and interacting with consumers. Moreover, Millennials i.e. the first digitally-based generation, are emerging as the segment of shoppers that retailers are currently focusing on engaging.

Gamification was once perceived as an activity of choice for teenage users only, however the ongoing competition in the digital landscape and the need for brands to adopt innovative concepts for driving engagement, have well established gamification as a key component to their marketing strategy.

Smart or Connected TVs have been rapidly emerging as a fast-growing alternative communication channel for retailers and brands across the whole digital omnichannel landscape. According to an Accedo forecast, a total market of around 500 million Smart TVs will occur by 2015.

TV-Commerce (television-driven purchases and TV-shops) and contextual advertising is the actual evolution of the Connected TVs. TV-Commerce engages users instantly, through their home comfort and living room. With just one click in the remote control, users can order their goods and receive them at their door.

A survey was conducted by InfoSociety S.A. at the Q4 of 2013 regarding the use of new technologies and the Web in Greece. From the survey several key findings can be derived, the most important of them being:

Given the ongoing growth in digital access and as mobile devices have become a pivotal part of modern society’s lifestyle, retailers and brands now need to consider adapting new marketing concepts to communicate with their consumers. As a different shopping behavior is evolving by a new generation of shoppers who are more tech-savvy and holders of multiple, comparative market information, retailers should now think beyond traditional fundamentals to build up marketing strategies in order to communicate with them.