Thu, 01/09/2014 – 11:18 by We anticipate that grocery stores will be on the forefront of indoor location and especially indoor or place-based marketing. They have enormous amounts of data about their customers (via loyalty programs), they’ve
got mobile apps, increasingly sophisticated email marketing and brand client-advertisers that want to influence in-store shoppers.
Shopping lists are
the most common in-store smartphone use case in grocery stores. The second most common is seeking coupons (often from grocery store apps). Accordingly the indoor consumer smartphone usage in grocery stores is already well established.
All of the above variables represent a potent combination and one that probably means we’ll see much faster and more aggressive adoption of indoor location and marketing than even in other retail segments.
Accordingly we were struck by the
announcement earlier this week that
inMarket was rolling out iBeacon-powered indoor location in Giant Eagle and Safeway grocery stores in three markets: San Francisco, Seattle and Cleveland Ohio. The company says that its iBeacons will be in many hundreds of stores by the end of the year.
Most media outlets covered the “iBeacon’s continuing momentum” angle. Indeed, iBeacons are small, cheap to install and are backed by Apple. However we’re at least as interested in the grocery store adoption angle.
The video (below) introducing inMarket’s “mobile to mortar program” showcases a range of use cases for its iBeacon offering:
- In-store use of shopping lists
- Nearby coupon notification
- Loyalty points based on in-store product visits/browsing (ShopKick like)
Point Inside is also very active in the grocery space and has a number of advanced implementations in market. We’ll be presenting some of these types of case studies at Place 2014 in New York in June.
inMarket Mobile to Mortar iBeacon Platform Capabilities Spot from
Sohrab Pirayesh on
Vimeo.
