Mobile Marketing

Dick's Sporting Goods has released 2012 Football, a digital publishing suite app for the iPad that's basically a retail catalog selling football cleats, equipment and apparel, according to Adobe.com's blog. It's designed to ease the gear research and purchasing process for the brand's football customers. For example, interactive photos of gear highlight helpful product attributes for the customer, while in-app videos demonstrate how they work. Combining these interactive features with the immersive experience of a catalog app, Dick's Sporting Goods is able to showcase products in the context of their environment and inspire consumers to buy, said the blog.

As part of the company's Smarter Commerce marketing effort, IBM is investigating the possibility of using augmented reality (AR) to help retailers provide more product information to their customers, as well as to gather more information about customers. The company's research labs have designed a prototype of a mobile application that can be used by store goers to identify products and retrieve more information about potential products. The company is testing it now with a number of retailers.

Smartphones currently influence 5.1 percent of annual retail store sales, translating into $159 billion in forecasted sales for 2012, according to new Deloitte research. For the first time in the industry, the in-depth study measures the "mobile influence factor," or impact of smartphones on in-store sales. The mobile influence factor captures the in-store sales driven by consumers' store-related smartphone activity such as product research, price comparison or other mobile application use.

During the “Mobile Meets Retail: Matching Products with People on Mobile and Social” session at the 2012 Mobile Marketing Association Forum, Steve Morse, manager of search and mobile marketing at Omaha Steaks, discussed the strides the company has taken since it dipped its toes in the mobile space. 

Do you consider yourself a connected consumer? Is your laptop next to your tablet and smartphone on your couch or nightstand? Maybe you have a go-to device for browsing and shopping? Zmags published a new report that reveals consumers don't turn to mobile apps for shopping, but do have device preferences when shopping different retail categories. The report also sheds light on the popularity and potential of tablet and Facebook shopping.

Empathica, a global provider of customer experience management solutions, announced that its Consumer Insights Panel survey of more than 6,500 U.S. consumers found that despite a high desire to provide feedback, consumers are disenchanted by brands’ lack of responsiveness. Survey results showed that 85 percent of consumers have provided some form of feedback to big-box retailers, yet only 46 percent of respondents believe that brands actually use this feedback to make constructive changes to the customer experience. 

By the summer 2012, Best Buy Canada will start rolling out mobile point-of-sale (POS) in select Future Shop and Best Buy pilot store locations. Implemented on the service oriented architecture (SOA)-based Stella Nova Mobile Retail Framework, the new mobile POS solution is architected to keep POS functionality independent of the mobile device and its operating system. This will enable the company to adapt seamlessly to future shifts in mobility trends and technology.

Conventional wisdom suggests that putting a mobile ad as close to the point of sale as possible is, for all the obvious reasons, the smartest local mobile targeting method. Geo-fencing and location profiling are, after all, two of the hottest areas of mobile ad tech right now. We presume that proximity aligns best with either intent or opportunity. Suprisingly, the highly geotargeted campaign of banner ads and mobile circulars actually enjoyed higher clickthrough rates when the user was furthest from a RadioShack.

Jeweler Tiffany & Co. is pushing a new collection by in-house designer Paloma Picasso and its mobile commerce-enabled site via an advertisement in the Pandora iPhone application.

Target has joined the Shopkick program, making it the largest retailer to reward its guests for using the app via their smart phones. Target guests nationwide can earn points for shopping at Target that can be redeemed for a variety of rewards.