• BUCKING THE TREND

    The Success Story of one savvy tech company launching its products into In-Store Retail.

It seems to be all we read about lately: Retail declining, consumer behaviours changing and brands consolidating and moving on-line. 

At the same time, one tech company based in Norway has a really cool product. It has the potential to be a disruptive challenger in a market worth over $15B in the U.S alone. This particular product fills a niche gap in that huge market potential, but they need to get their product into the hands of shoppers. Put simply, they need to generate tactile familiarity between their product and consumers. They need an in-store strategy. 

This young company understands the need for coexistence of their on-line and in-store strategies. They know the niche that their product fits in the market and they know they need to educate the shopper to highlight the features and benefits of their product. They also know that consumer behaviours are changing, and that on-line transactions will continue to rise and ultimately dwarf those in store. 

So, for this company, it became clear that they needed an in-store strategy to work alongside their on-line strategy to achieve the following goals: 

  • Create a rich and impactful digital shopper experience 
  • Provide ways to educate the shopper in-store to highlight the niche features and benefits and raise the profile of this young company’s brand 
  • Provide ways to educate the retailer about the niche features of this product against the competition 
  • Foster the opportunity for shoppers to engage with the product – to gain tactile familiarity 
  • Create methods to validate the in-store strategy and measure the shopper engagement and footfall interest in the full understanding that many transactions would still occur on-line. 
  • Identify a partner who could design and deliver solutions to achieve these goals, and then scale them across a huge number of in-store retail locations. 

Our Solution

When Ground Support Labs were approached by a young but rapidly growing company in Europe looking to create a brand new in-store experience for shoppers, it was clear from the very first conversations that the key to the success of this project was to build a highly engaging in-store digital experience that could be dynamic to consumer behaviours. We needed to build a solution that could react and respond when a shopper approached or interacted with our customer’s product, and we needed to communicate the rich functionality of the product to the shopper at the very moment that they experienced the product itself. A dynamic call-to-action approach was required.

But more than that, we also knew how important it was to this company to validate the in-store experience strategy, and to learn about the consumer behaviours through real time reporting and to be able to adjust and evolve their retail strategy as they learned more about their retail shopper journey.

Arguably though, the most critical part of this in-store strategy would be to create something that was highly reliable, scalable, and cost effective. It would need to be plug-and-play for effortless installation in stores without any disruption. It would need an all-inclusive support model that maximised remote management and remote control and minimised any risk of service truck rolls.

This project needed to be built on one of the most powerful, reliable and feature-rich Consumer Engagement Technology Platforms available.

Ground Support Labs set about designing and building a bespoke digital experience for this company with a highly engaging custom designed digital screen and intelligent content delivery based on specific shopper behaviours. By including a variety of sensors built on an IoT platform for detecting consumer interactions and dwell times, GSL were able to target those behaviours with context specific delivery of impactful messaging and triggered video delivery to attract, engage, inform, and educate the shopper. 

The entire solution was built on the GSL XEN Platform which provides a cloud-based CMS software for content playlist management as well as unparalleled proactive device monitoring by the GSL Network Operations Center (NOC) and industry leading remote management. This facilitated a ‘plug-and-play’ approach to deploying this retail experience with internet data provided by GSL’s managed 4G LTE connectivity solution that could roam across multiple European countries on a single blended plan. 

Education of the retail store team was also a very important element to this project to ensure that the features and benefits of the product could be explained in detail by the store team if a shopper asked for assistance. To facilitate this, GSL built into the digital 

experience a ‘training mode’ that would allow the digital screen to be used to give an in-store training presentation using a slide-advancer feature. The training presentation could be remote managed in just the same way as the digital content so that it could evolve as new features and benefits of the product are developed. 

The Results

The results of the pilot phase of this project into fifteen locations across northern Europe have been highly successful. The plug-and-play design of this experience meant for a disruption free, and commercially viable delivery of this project. 

This young brand now enjoys a growing prominence of their product in major stores across European Cities, and they have daily data dashboards of consumer interactions and engagements delivered straight to their browser of choice. Shoppers are experiencing the product and learning about the compelling features that it offers in a way that they never could on-line. 

Data demonstrates high levels of dwell and engagement at the shelf which validates the digital attraction and the retail strategy. Whether ultimately the till receipts occur on-line or in-store, this company has the peace of mind of knowing that the digital in-store experience is delivering, performing, and positively influencing the shopper.

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