In Retail, Culture Trumps Technology
January 17, 2014 Leave a comment
January 16, 2014, 8:42 PM ET
In Retail, Culture Trumps Technology
We’ve all heard the pitch for over a decade: technology will help retailers send contextually relevant marketing messages to mobile devices of consumers wandering around malls and shopping districts. But despite advances in telecommunications infrastructure and data collection and analysis, there’s little proof that any of this actually sells so much as an extra pair of jeans.The problem, however, may not be with the technology. Ram Menon, president of social computing at Tibco Software Inc.TIBX +5.29%, says “culture plays a big role in how successful this is.”
According to Mr. Menon, U.S. consumers are tired, distracted, and maybe a little jaded. Even if a retailer’s technology is responsive and their smartphone’s GPS signal is accurate to the meter, American consumers might not respond in meaningful numbers to a targeted text message.
The same is generally not true of an Asian consumer walking along the main shopping district on Orchard Street in Singapore, he said. “In Asia, the propensity for this type of strategy to work is very high,” said Mr. Menon during an interview in New York.
This is largely because the phone “is seen by many [in Asia] as a personal accessory rather than a device merely for information,” he said in a subsequent email exchange.
In China and Southeast Asia, brand is paramount and price is next, so if retailers can “ascertain the brand affinity of the shopper from past purchases and couple that with pricing discounts — there is a huge propensity to make impulse purchases,” he said. In India, shoppers respond to price-sensitive offers, he explained.
Tibco offers applications used to analyze customer behavior and create marketing campaigns of this sort. Mr. Menon, formerly the chief marketing officer for Tibco, was in New York to promote its tibbr collaboration platform.
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