Showrooming. Everybody’s heard of it by now—conniving shoppers checking out a product in a retail store, then buying it online later for less. Best Buy’s 2012 stock price tumble was largely blamed on showrooming, while other retailers including Target, ToysRUs and PetSmart also felt showrooming’s effect on their bottom lines. But this emphasis on showrooming is misplaced, in my view, and I’m not alone. Sean Bartlett, director of mobile strategy and platforms for big-box hardware retailer Lowe’s put it this way in his remarks at last January’s Mobile Marketing Forum in San Francisco: “Showrooming is just a new title for doing your homework.”
My latest research report for GigaOm Pro explores how retailers can join ’em instead of fight ’em by providing rich mobile data experiences for shoppers in-store. Enabling data-hungey customer appetites for mobile data presents opportunities for retailers to: raise customer value by presenting timely offers and rewards, capitalize on the high level of correlation between in-store mobile app usage and same-day sales, capture valuable business intelligence and generate new revenue streams by capturing more of the “path to purchase.”
Unfortunately, GigaOm’s discontinuance of operations on March, 2015 caused the link to this report’s summary to go offline.
