With 47,025 views on slideshare in under a week, Nurun’s social media director Greg Pouy is getting a lot of social media love for his most excellent Future of Commerce deck (embedded below).
It’s no mean feat for a 138 pages long treatise (crazy Greg photos and Youtube embeds notwithstanding), but it’s one of the best primers we’ve seen for a while on where commerce is headed. The deck would make for inspiring creative stimulus in your next strategy workshop.
The top top-line summary. The future of commerce is digitally-enhanced customer experience – using social, location-aware and mobile technology (SoLoMo) to enhance the customer experience – empowering people to shop smarter and with more fun – using connected technology. Customer happiness is your digital business model. We couldn’t agree more.
So here are 36 questions for you, taken from the experience of trailblazing brands covered in the deck. Read the questions, and we challenge you not to come up with at least five concrete ideas for how to future-proof your digitally-enhanced business. Enjoy.
- If Apple are cashing out customers with mobile devices wherever the customer is on the shop floor, what could you be doing?
- If Visa has taken a stake in mobile credit card reader company Square, what could you be doing?
- If Etsy has created a $40m specialist online marketplace for arts and crafts, what could you be doing?
- If a newsletter of Parisian shopping tips, MyLittleParis, grow to 150K subscribers, what could you be doing?
- If Uniqlo offers dynamic pricing based on the number of tweets a product gets, what could you be doing?
- If Ebay has bought Milo.com, a price comparison site, what could you be doing?
- If AirBnB a specialist bed and breakfast marketplace has 100K listings in 16K cities, and 186 cities, and is now valued at $1bn, what could you be doing?
- If Kickstarter is a specialist marketplace for funding innovative startups with a threshold pledging (crowdfunding) model, what could you be doing?
- If Zipcar makes subscription car rental a smarter choice for 560,000 members (and Ctiroen is developing their own version), what could you be doing
- If Shoeline increased conversion by 44% by adding product videos (and Amazon has just added 224,000 videos), what could you be doing?
- If French Connection’s YouTuque allows people to click through from YouTube videos to product pages, what could you do?
- If GoTryItOn allows people to use their mobile phone to get immediate feedback from users and professional stylists (Gap/Sephora) on what to buy, what could you be doing?
- If the Gensco group generated a 304% increase in ROI by adding real-time assistance tools (Click-to-chat, click-to-call), what could you be doing?
- If Best Buy use Twitter as a customer service channel with their Twelpforce, what could you be doing?
- If Amazon and Levi’s are using Facebook social plugins and open graph to personalise the shopping experience what could you be doing?
- If Amazon releases a mobile app that allows customers to compare prices in store to Amazon prices, what could you be doing?
- If Tommy Hilfiger tripled the number of unique visitors to its site by offering customisation tools, what could you do?
- If Levi’s reduced return rates by 45% by adding customer reviews to its site, what could you do?
- If Dell uses Twitter as a channel for selling overstock – generating $6.5m in sales – what could you do?
- If Triumph Lingerie uses Facebook as a channel for selling to fans with exclusive fan-pricing, what could you do?
- If Feelgoods.com allows brands to offer Facebook Credits as rewards to users for signing up, sharing, commenting and purchasing, what could you do?
- If Diesel connects Facebook cameras to fitting rooms, so shoppers can get immediate feedback, what could you do?
- If Mercedes equips car showroom sales staff with iPads to improve the customer experience, what could you do?
- If GoodYoga uses iPads so guests can sign up for courses, what could you do?
- If cupcake bakery offers customers free frosting shot rewards if they like them on Facebook, what could you do?
- If restaurant Stacked allows customers to order from an iPad, what could you do?
- If L’Oreal created the Instant Beauty app to improve customer experience by helping people evaluate products better with reviews and expert advice, what could you do
- If Unilever created a smart ice cream vending machine that rewarded people for smiling, what could you do?
- If Kraft is partnering with Intel to create in-store meal-planning kiosks that suggest dishes and ingredients, what could you do?
- If Audi and Amex offer special rewards and incentives to social media influencers (people with a high Klout score (the Las Vegas Palm Hotel has a Klout Club), what could you do?
- If Thinknear takes the local deals market one step further, by offering close-by deals to people who have a moment to spare, what could you do?
- If group-buy giant Groupon formed a partnership with check-in service Foursquare, what could you do?
- If Tesco took wait-marketing to a new level, creating a virtual store for people waiting in subway stations (full-size posters of supermarket aisles with codes that could be scanned with handsets to order), what could you do
- If Sephora improved customer experience with a mobile app that allowed store visitors to see customer review and get real-tiem discounts, what could you do?
- If Gucci allows people to buy direct from their iPad catalogue, what could you do?
- If Ebay’s mobile app reduces time to check-out, whilst generating more interactions, what could you do?
