In-Store Digital: Who Needs It?

In retail, sometimes there’s a sense that if it moves, digitize it. The impulse to fill stores with screens that do little more than offer endless moving images, or the opportunity to browse an equally endless catalogue showing everything a retailer can’t get out onto the sales floor, is something that many find themselves powerless to resist.

As such, these environments do little to enrich the shopping experience and may even turn some shoppers off.  You don’t head to the mall to watch another version of TV or to look at a screen that bears more than a passing resemblance to what you look at on your laptop every day.

Yet there is some point to digital and used sensitively, it can actually provide an in-store experience that will make the shopper want to come back or even add value to a shopping journey.

A good example of this opened in the Westfield London mall in west London recently. Here, infant and baby clothing and equipment retailer Mamas & Papas has used digital for everything from clouds that drift across the upper perimeter walls and morph into animals and then back into clouds, to a screen that helps shoppers choose a stroller.

The trick that this retailer appears to have pulled off is identifying a need and supplying a digital solution, rather than simply installing something and hoping for the best. There’s even a digital weighing station where a young child can play while being weighed so parents can determine the appropriate car seat.

The truth of the matter is that digital is probably not needed as a means of generating incremental sales by many retailers, but retailers that can find a real use for in-store tech are positioned to emerge ahead of the pack.

John Ryan is a journalist covering the retail sector, a role he has fulfilled for more than a decade. As well as being the European Editor of VMSD magazine, he writes for a broad range of publications in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany with a focus on in-store marketing, display and layout, as well as the business of store architecture and design. In a previous life, he was a buyer for C&A, based in London and then Düsseldorf, Germany. He lives and works in London.