How Retailers Should Use Foursquare
Yesterday, as I walked into a clothes shop near Oxford Street, I heard a beep. I’m not sure what it was but it made me think, hang on, do “real world” shops count visitors? They record their sales but do they know their conversion rates?
This led me down the path of thinking about location based services and the potential to use data from check-ins to pro-actively personalise real world shopping experiences.
I visualised some kind of doorway device, perhaps using infra-red or maybe a pressure pad, to count people in. Then I realised that if you’re going to stick a device on a doorway you have a media platform and that platform already exists. It’s Foursquare and Facebook Places.
A quick hop onto the docs showed me that Foursquare have designed a set of features that retailers can use to customise their service:
We’ve built simple self-service tools to allow you, the business manager, to create different kinds of foursquare Specials, manage multiple Specials and ultimately track how these Specials perform. We think these services will empower you to develop more engaging ongoing relationships with your customers.
Been here three times this week, sir? Have a free muffin with that flat white. This is real world personalisation, based on online, social data. However, it’s not quite the whole hog.
Pro-active real world personalisation
Amazon don’t wait for you to ask. They’re pro-active about putting book covers in your face. Yet with the Foursquare approach so far, the onus is on the customer.
They need to look at their mobile app, read a notification message, put aside their shyness and remember when they go to the counter to say “hey, I’ve been here three times this week, I qualify for a muffin”.
Instead, imagine a screen on the counter, facing towards the shop assistant. On the screen, there’s a dashboard to a web service that aggregates data from Facebook Places, Foursquare, Gowhalla and their future ilk and runs it through things like the retailer’s EPoS / CRM system and Rapleaf’s increasingly scary personal search to display “insight into who’s in the room”.
This is exactly what Peeraround does to Foursquare already and you can see their value articulation includes both “useful social tool” and “business CRM”:
Making this data available to the shop assistant means that now, when a customer checks in, the shop assistant can see who they are and take the initiative to pro-actively personalise the experience. Excuse me sir, I see you’ve been here three times this week. Would you like a free muffin?
Going beyond the muffin
This kind of dashboard is, perhaps, a minimum viable product for an enterprise wrapper around location based data APIs. However, if we widen our view of the shop beyond the counter, it’s clear that there’s more than just a muffin at stake.
A little business logic and voilà, the products being modeled on the big plasma outside the changing room are tailored to the person standing there. The interactive whiteboard shows what your friends bought.
Equally, customers who have Foursquare installed all have the hardware capability to read product information and pricing through their camera and an AR interface. Imagine scanning the label on products you’re interested in to find out if you qualify for a personal discount.
Evaluating the business model
I sketched out a rough business model for a startup based around providing the web service platform:
It’s clear that there are risks. Location based services might not cross over to the mainstream. If successful, it would appear easy to copy the software. I suspect you’d have to craft a service that’s simple enough to get traction whilst integrated enough to provide lock in and defensibility.
However, it feels to me like there’s some inevitability here. It’s hard to see how the world won’t be like Bladerunner, given that personalisation works and the data already exists.
Retailers need to adapt now. The question is, is it worth making it simple for them to do so?
