HOW LEADING BRANDS ARE MOVING PAST UNIFIED COMMERCE – WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
The steady drumbeat of e-commerce continuous to march on and there’s little to stop it. Nothing other than the opening of economies as we edge towards the end of the global pandemic. That is of course unless you believe that digital penetration has reached its peak.
Some industries will see a bit of a slowdown, but that will be limited. When it comes to digital penetration in retail, we are right in the middle of a shift. A shift that will take us past Unified Commerce and onto the only logical next step.
If you look all around, you’ll find examples. Coach. Gucci. Ikea. The next logical step is to expand customer experience in a way that makes it plain. Meeting customer desire and solving customer problems is all that matters.
Do We Know What Customers Want?
What if, you could know what products actually caught the attention of your customers? How much is that information worth? We think we know in today’s advertising landscape based on user search history and ‘dwell’ time. That gives us a sample set of data to work with, but often it’s not very accurate.
Consider the following. People often stop on a section of the page for a number of reasons. Their kid is calling, yelling, crying. The phone rang. The product was hideous to them and they paused to take it in, grab a screenshot, and then bash it with their friends? Or maybe, they couldn’t hold it any longer and they ran to the restroom. The point is, we don’t actually know. We are inferring intent from the data that we can capture.
The same goes for search history. Again, we can get close, but nothing annoys me more than having to see a million ads for something that I don’t care about. Where did they get this information?
Oh! It was from that one time when I didn’t quite know how to describe something, so I used the best available terms my brain could string together. The terms were, at best, tangentially related. But now I have to pay the price for it. Ad, after ad, after ad. All for an item I have zero interest in purchasing.
It makes me want to never use google (to search) again or figure out how to opt-out of everything! Enter Apple’s seismic change to the mobile ad industry – story for another day.
There Is a Better Way
What if you knew your customer’s desire? With the right shopping experience, you can tell if they stepped away from their device. Or, if they are actually focused and looking for more detail about the specific product in question.
What happens if the customer leaves the experience without making the purchase? Guess what? Your in-environment sales team and brand ambassadors are armed with near-perfect information. Information to provide hyper-personalized services when the customer re-enters the store. This level of personalization is possible with game engine technology.
Welcome to Immersive Commerce
Leading brands such as Nike, Lancôme, Coca-Cola, and Kenzo are dabbling with advanced technology such as AR, 3d, and game technology. The issue is, no one has stepped back to reimagine retail. Instead, companies are applying these technological advancements to their existing commerce machinery.
Nothing against this approach or the companies who’ve put it to use. But, eventually, the machinery will take on Frankenstein’s monster’s persona. A total patchwork of different pieces and parts that work but aren’t efficient and lead to a feeling like something is missing. An elegant, yet simple solution is needed. Game engine technology such as those provided by Unity and Unreal Engine are waiting.
The real power of game engines allows us to create realistic virtual worlds. Virtual worlds powered by game engines natively support 3D imagery and collaboration. This collaboration enables true squad-shopping (shopping with friends). It makes it extremely easy to add brand ambassadors and staff to the environment to provide unparalleled service and experiences.
It provides a natural environment for AI bots and highly personalized advertising. Lastly, the data and analytics world is turned upside down. This environment gives us context about the customer and their movements in the virtual space as a way to uncover their intent. These realistic simulated worlds have a promising future in a number of ways.
In fact, in 2018 Unity announced a partnership with DeepMind. Danny Lange, Unity’s vice-president of ai and machine learning, said at the time that the game engine would become “a primary research platform for creating complex virtual environments that will enable the development of algorithms capable of learning to solve complex tasks”.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, said: “Games and simulations have been a core part of DeepMind’s research programme from the very beginning and this approach has already led to significant breakthroughs in AI research. As a former video game designer myself, I couldn’t be more excited to be collaborating with Unity, creating virtual environments for developing and testing the kind of smart, flexible algorithms we need to tackle real-world problems.”
If game engines are sufficiently powerful enough to provide the foundation of significant AI research, it’s safe to posit that they are absolutely powerful enough to power the future of commerce.
Join us as we Turn On What’s Next in commerce and
journey towards Immersive Commerce.
