Consumers around the world crave personalization. In fact, 40.6% of Chinese millennial consumers don’t mind paying a premium for a personalized product. In discussing consumers’ attraction toward luxury goods with Jing Daily, Longchamp Creative Director Sophie Delafontaine hints at why personalization resonates so well today. “Nowadays, people are not looking for a bag, they’re looking for something special, something which really reflects who they are,” she said. “And this is particularly true when speaking of customers buying luxury bags.”

But if people look for products or experiences that reflect themselves, developing those impactful experiences can seem particularly challenging in a country so wide and vast as China: just 15% of its population is equal to the UK, Germany and France combined. By investing in personalization, your brand becomes better fit to further segment those audiences into actionable demographics that inspire and co-collaborate in new, emotionally resonant experiences.

To start, consider how to make a more meaningful impact throughout the customer decision journey (CDJ) and strategize around how that builds into a first-party relationship with individual users. This mindset is key for the approach we take in the work that we do, utilizing the full suite of Adobe’s Experience Cloud to deliver memorable experiences that emotionally resonate.

The Need for Data-Driven Creative Experiences

Some might see “data-driven creative” as an oxymoron, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Brands exist to serve their customers with the utmost care through the following simple reminder: behind every data point sits a real human being with a voice. That said, the aggregated data from your Adobe Analytics backend can help you better understand what resonates with consumers across the WeChat ecosystem, preparing your team to better understand the growing needs of Chinese consumers and confidently optimize their journeys.

It’s obvious that analytics can help determine which product design performs best or whether KPIs have been met. But more interesting—and this is where brands must direct more attention—is how you can use consumer interaction data to pre-test and iterate upon an idea, essentially turning users into contributors to your product design.

This process enables you to focus your efforts on key strategic areas that build both innovation and momentum in incremental steps. In developing an app or web platform, you can use these analytics to identify and remove steps that don’t add value to the user experience and adopt a more customer-obsessed approach as you go.

Here’s a breakdown of the process that has worked for us in A/B testing audiences and specific experiences built for them, using Adobe Target in a four-week sprint cycle. First, spend the first week building a hypothesis around your user—this is where personas and research come into play. Next, test and learn your prototype by launching it for the audience segments matching these personas. Once you have a minimum of about 15,000 data points, you should have enough insights to build and launch the app. Post-launch, make sure to continue to test and iterate for effectiveness. Be mindful, as this bond creates a conversation between the user and the product designers and helps inform upcoming consumer needs.

Identify Triggers and Intent for Impact

Effective personalization requires you to rethink what you thought you knew about demographics. What’s important isn’t just what Tencent UserID provides—what matters is the content that clicks with a user, and any personalized platform should recognize these preferences across a creatively differentiated experience. Adobe does this seamlessly via its Experience Cloud’s Visitor ID: a fixed, persistent identifier per WeChat user that visits your mini-program, WeChat Ecom Store or other digital properties of the brand. This allows you to build comprehensive profiles of your visitors based on their actions and interests, augmenting the data from WeChat.

Consumers are more comfortable providing data when they understand there’s a fair tradeoff. From a user experience perspective, aim for transparency in how your platform translates user interactions into recommendations and new content. The PUMA “run my way” campaign began by acquiring the user’s OpenID via a QR code scan, allowing for personalization by giving each user a choice in the color and finish of their puma avatar as well as options for the soundtrack. After running through the scene via a treadmill, users conclude the experience with a personalized video takeaway.

So, how can you execute with a platform that achieves something similar? First, move away from a one-size-fits-all mentality. Adobe Analytics and Target let you identify and segment audiences for testing, leveraging touchpoints throughout the customer decision journey to inform creative design and tailoring the user experience toward business outcomes. By turning successful tests into perpetual personalization activities, you can continue to serve your audiences their preferred experience through Adobe Target.

This part of the process trips up those who haven’t properly set up an attribution model or strategy for success, leading some to consider abandoning personalization altogether. It begs the question: if businesses continue to inundate users with the same, irrelevant ads again and again through careless retargeting in external channels, were they ever really personalizing in the first place?

Personalization is your chance to build the experience your users have always wanted on your own properties. With the right toolset, this is a tangible and practical thing to do. The mighty size of the Chinese consumer market truly enables even the most sophisticated personalization powered by machine learning in Adobe Target. It requires a lot of data, but in return offers automated targeting of your experiences to just the audiences most likely to respond. And it has the power to change the messaging and creative of any experience to the options that work best for a particular segment of the audience — all without a data analyst’s involvement.

Personalization done properly actually empowers the user to craft their own product and design their own journey to their own liking. Through a data-driven creative process that focuses its strategy on assisting your WeChat users, you can drive more meaningful, impactful, memorable user experiences.

Oleg Sidorenko, Solutions Director EMEA at MediaMonks, contributed to this piece.

Shoppers are increasingly turning to their devices both before and while they shop: in “Building the Integrated Retail Commerce Business Case,” Forrester reports that 36.5% of physical retail sales are influenced by digital, indicating that the boundary between digital and brick-and-mortar has blurred. Retailers can use this to their advantage by embedding digital solutions directly within the in-store experience, providing convenience to shoppers while influencing key purchasing decisions.

How, and why, are shoppers using digital in stores already? For many, it’s bringing together the convenience of technology with the ways that consumers shop. According to a survey from eMarketer on the leading business challenges facing retailers today, 50% of US respondents noted that customers have become accustomed to serving themselves, and want more technology to facilitate that by making it easier to shop online and off simultaneously.

MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar calls this “having the brand at hand,” making it easy for consumers to engage with brands and retailers at a moment’s notice. This can be as simple as researching what’s in stock at a store before a visit, to checking product reviews right in front of store shelves. But retailers can go further in how they embed digital tools and content in the brick and mortar shopping experience.

How Bricks and Clicks Augment the In-Store Experience

The retailers that will last are those who embrace unifying the digital and physical retail experiences. According to the same report from Forrester quoted above, “Digital business pros in retail must include both physical stores and digital capabilities in their business case and ensure that they support and build on one another to create a holistic customer experience.”

While we know now according to eMarketer, 67% will browse digitally before making a purchase, MediaMonks Lead Strategist Michael Litman reminds retailers of the value of a consumer “showrooming” and embracing this growing trend. He reminds us that “Many shoppers are using mobile devices to shop online while in the store,” he says. “Either retailers lean in to this and make sure they are providing the best experience for the best price, or showrooming will continue to hinder them and prompt consumers to shop elsewhere.”

Retailers are starting to mix personalization and contextual shopping—mainstays of the online experience—at brick and mortar locations. Take, for example, Canadian supermarket Sobeys, who recently announced a recent pilot of a smart shopping cart that offers recommendations, promotions and the ability to pay at the cart. In the quick-service food space, McDonald’s aims to provide a more personalized drive-thru experience via digital displays that react to triggers like weather, trending menu items and more.

Both of these developments aim to boost profits, increase customer satisfaction and service more guests. The Sobeys shopping carts, for instance, don’t aim to replace the retailer’s staff but rather give them the opportunity to make more meaningful connections with consumers on the floor, like answering questions about products or even recommending recipes. This direct connection is a strength of brick and mortar retail, which is why you see so many digital-native, direct-to-consumer brands opening up stores in cosmopolitan cities—and embracing digital tools can help retailers expand their focus and care for the consumer.

Digital Offers New Opportunities for Storytelling

One of the clearest ways that digital can augment the in-store experience is by providing additional context to consumers about the products they discover on the shelf. For example, Amazon’s famous Amazon 4-Star shops integrate digital shopping data (its namesake stems from the fact that all products on display have average review scores of four stars and above) with the in-store experience.

But digital also offers retailers new storytelling opportunities as a means to educate shoppers about a product. For Tommy Hilfiger, we developed a series of behind-the-scenes mobile content that gives its Spring 2018 collection a bit more color by enabling shoppers to not only admire the clothing on display, but establish a stronger connection with the brand and its creative process.

Here’s how it works: users encounter clothing items on the shelf, which feature scannable QR codes on their tags. After scanning a code, shoppers become immersed in the world of Tommy Hilfiger via a media-rich mobile site offering catwalk footage, designer interviews, outfit breakdowns and even design mood boards. Users can explore by simply moving their phone, providing an added layer of immersion and whimsey to the experience.

Of course, the content is shoppable; the microsite lets users seamlessly purchase looks (and related items) via their phone. This makes it easy for users to purchase items that might be out of stock in the store, offering more convenience and making a best-of-both-worlds approach to retail shopping online and off.

Add to that the digital experience’s ease to implement—retail locations need only scannable posters and the tags themselves—and you’ve got content that’s easy to scale across stores and your consumer base. Such an embrace of digital and its inherent value in the retail experience has earned Tommy Hilfiger the #3 spot in Fast Company’s most innovative companies in style.

Use Location to Your Advantage

Another strategy to mix the brick and mortar experience with digital is to ensure the shopping experience extends outside the typical constraints of brick-and-mortar shopping, like shelf space or hours of operation. Digital shoppers are used to having any item with just a few clicks—and sometimes delivered within the day or even hour. Thus, digital tools can accommodate toward shoppers’ expectation for easy access and instant gratification.

When apparel brand MadeWorn released their clothing collection at a pop-up within the Fred Segal flagship store, we worked with Mastercard to create a digital experience that gives “window shopping” a new meaning by installing interactive window displays that invited passersby to browse and purchase without entering the store—extending the shopping experience outside the walls of the store, but also outside standard operating hours.

In addition to the function of making a purchase, we also developed exclusive, location-based Snapchat lenses that celebrate the local music scene, just like the collection itself. The lenses take the experience even further by giving shoppers something to share while they’re physically present at the pop-up.

What this all boils down to is that digital and brick and mortar are not mutually exclusive. By closely integrating the two and adopting a holistic “bricks and clicks” mindset, brands can achieve a more cohesive shopping ecosystem that builds on consumer expectations while moving the needle on business outcomes.

The back-to-school season is incredibly important for retailers: an Adobe roundup of back-to-school stats notes that the shopping season netted 17% of total retail sales in 2017, second only to holiday shopping. That’s a lot of pencils to sharpen! Adobe also notes a trend in families beginning their shopping earlier as years pass, and while most shopping is done in-store, a quarter of parents seek inspiration on social sites like Facebook.

With these insights in mind, it’s clear that relevance is tantamount to brands and retailers hoping to make the grade in the intensely competitive fall season. By bringing together data, media strategy and creative, brands stand to achieve much more relevant messaging whenever and wherever inspiration strikes the consumer—and save in cost and time to market in the process, too. As retailers pull into their most important time of the year, embracing a fit for format approach is key to optimizing exposure in a way that brings the greatest ROI.

Achieve Versatility and Consistency with Fit for Format

With the customer journey spread across channels, relevance is key—not just in terms of content, but also how you frame it up. Every asset should be designed to provide value in the environment where consumers will find it, but developing this volume of content can be a great challenge for brands at first glance. If this sounds familiar, a production partner can help augment your team to scale up production for more assets, relevance and exposure.

This challenge is especially felt by retailers in back-to-school season because there are so many products to highlight and feature, from apparel to tech to school supplies or even dorm furniture. When Mexican department store Coppel wanted to celebrate the variety of savings in their 2019 back-to-school campaign, for example, they needed a partner that could provide an efficient creative process to produce format-ready assets at scale—a service that few production companies in the region are equipped to provide. Recognizing work that we had done with other major retailers like Ikea, Coppel’s agency Saatchi & Saatchi turned to the MediaMonks office in Mexico City for a unique mix of global perspective and amazing local talent to open their TVC script up to new variation and formats.

“Back to school is a very important moment for Coppel,” says Adrian Pastrana, Interactive Producer at MediaMonks. “Having a variety of assets enables Coppel to show their diversity of products, so supporting other digital formats in this way helps them feature more of their stock to the people most interested in it.” Over the course of a three-day shoot, the team produced 73 assets, ready for publishing in print, OOH and across a handful of social platforms.

The big idea approach that some brands favor doesn’t always lend well to this type of process. Instead, we recommend pursuing several smaller, interrelated ideas that share a sense of continuity and coherence. The concept that unites both the TVC and social aspect is the use of lighting on the set and the same main characters,” says Pastrana. “In this respect, we used the same resources to focus on different messages or categories per channel: the tech and home categories were highlighted in digital assets, for example, while we focused on apparel and Coppel’s promotion with the TVC.”

Context is About More than Place and Time

Relevance isn’t just about framing content in the right place and time. In the report “The Power of Customer Context,” Forrester Research notes the importance of taking a wider view of what context really encompasses, urging brands to consider the full scope of user journeys: “Work with your customer experience team to build a marketing strategy to address the end-to-end customer journeys—before, during, and after purchase.”

You must also build around behaviors native to the channels in which your audience engages. Recognizing the features through which teens express themselves on social media, Amazon sought a value-added way to promote its Amazon Teen program for 2018’s back-to-school season. Working with MediaMonks, the retailer didn’t just settle for a series of ads fit for Snapchat and Instagram to build buzz; in addition, we provided a platform that supported the way teens interact with one another digitally.

The resulting #GetTheYes campaign invited students to pitch parents to approve their back-to-school wish lists. The site used a familiar, sticker-like aesthetic that let users customize a message much like they would a Snapchat or Instagram story, letting them express themselves in a way that made sense—especially if they were led to the site via one of the Snap or Instagram ads, offering a seamless transition. It’s worth noting that the campaign also included Facebook ads that spoke to parents on their level, highlighting the importance of remembering that back-to-school is about speaking to both children and their parents, and the need to speak to what matters for both of them.

Study Hard and Make the Grade

What’s notable about back to school is that the season doesn’t have a specific opening or hard deadline; early-bird shoppers might begin their hauls in July, while others will wait into September. Use the long-lasting shopping season to your advantage by collecting insights from your campaign’s early days to optimize it over time. Easily transformable, format-ready content makes this process easier by allowing you to mix and match different layers of content—including products featured, composition and copy—and A/B test which performs best with which segments.

Doing so gives your brand a competitive edge in an incredibly important yet competitive shopping season. Equipped to produce a variety of versatile, fit-for-format content, you can give some love to the full extent of your products or offerings in a way that’s relevant to a wide variety of consumers, earning high marks into the following holiday season.

With the emergence of e-commerce giants and online competition, a new breed of future-thinking retailers has emerged. ANA’s 2019 Future of Retail Report notes that “The future involves having the right culture, using innovative approaches and technologies and a having a willingness and the skills to use data to learn from customers.” Future-thinking retailers, who can no longer rely on old strategies built on convenience and variety of product, are seeking to immerse their customers within tech-infused and value-added experiences.

These brands strive to attract and inspire consumers through in-store experiences, and must carefully consider how to bridge together offline and online, digital and physical—a delicate balance through which forward-thinking retailers stand to build equity through innovation and differentiation.

When users register to race at the in-store kiosk, for example, they’re offered the chance to provide a handful of information to personalize their racing experience. From inputting their name and chosen country to represent, to uploading a photo of their face overlaid with a custom helmet rendered much like an AR selfie filter, participants can immediately imagine themselves in the racing cockpit. After selecting a team to race with, they get to “meet” their coach: racers Max Verstappen (Red Bull team) and Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes-Benz AMG), who offer advice before the race on a seamlessly integrated mobile site and even react to users’ performance afterward.

Of course, in a competitive experience like this, people want bragging rights, so real-time performance results are key. These are offered in metrics like the user’s driving speed and time around each lap. “Racers can take the data from the race and compare how well they did against other people, providing additional insight to their takeaway video,” says Kenmore, referencing the video users receive after completing a race. This personalized takeaway portrays highlights from the race, allowing them to remember the experience or share out to friends.

From pumping up participants as they prepare for the race to offering personalized feedback reactive to their unique performance, the NYCGP experience is built around inspiring a drive for performance and success within a friendly competitive environment—and that’s where the story behind the brand shines through. It’s through these moments that the new flagship store effectively tells the brand story to an audience that might be unfamiliar and unaware, building a strong personal connection in the process.

Puma set out to achieve precisely this in opening its first North American flagship store last week on 5th Avenue, New York City’s premier shopping street. Aiming to immerse shoppers in a seamless mix of technology, art and creativity, the store offers several opportunities for shoppers to engage directly with the brand through apparel customization, in-store classes on printing with streetwear brand Chinatown Market, and smart mirrors that help shoppers browse alternative colors and styles.

“This serves not only as a platform for getting product across, but also as a visualization or embodiment of our presence in this market, and New York in particular,” Adam Petrick, Puma’s Global Director of Brand and Marketing, told The Drum. In that respect, the store isn’t simply about selling products, but providing a space for consumers to engage with and better understand the brand.

Perhaps the most interesting way the store achieves is through its motorsport experience, the NYCGP. The NYCGP invites consumers to (virtually) suit up, strap in and race through the surrounding streets of New York City in professional-grade F1 simulators developed by Evotek—the same simulators that real racers use. MediaMonks supported the experience by developing mobile sites for onboarding and offboarding, personalized registration via in-store kiosks and providing custom code to translate users’ racing performance from the simulator into a global leaderboard, updated in real time.

Build Awareness Through Brand Storytelling

The description above either excites you because you’re an F1 fan, or has you scratching your head asking: F-what? F1 racing isn’t as popular to North Americans as it is to the brand’s home in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, though the motorsport experience aims to change that in a personalized and exhilarating way. “Part of the drive behind Puma’s NYCGP motorsport experience was to help North America recognize F1 the way Europe does,” says Paige Kenmore, Experiential Sr. Producer at MediaMonks.

It also highlights the brand’s longstanding dedication to the sport through its racewear apparel and sponsorship of top teams like Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, both of which are represented in the motorsport experience via brand ambassadors Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. “[Brand] awareness is high, but actual understanding of all the things we’re doing on a daily basis isn’t as high as I’d like it to be,” Petrick told The Drum. By opening the conversation around the brand’s support for the sport, the motorsport experience serves as a great example for how to get those messages across.

“What’s really special about this experience is that this is brand ambassador focused, bringing the team celebrities into the experience to play a significant narrative role,” says Jessica Norton, Executive Producer at MediaMonks. “You’re engaging directly with the team members, and this gives the experience an added layer.”

And this gets at the heart of what makes the experience—and by proxy, the store itself—really special: it eases shoppers into a world that might be new to them in a way that showcases what sets the brand apart from other athletic wear brands. “The NYCGP makes the experience personal and intimate to New York City itself, placing it in a landscape that they’re familiar with,” says Kenmore. In fact, racers and spectators will see the Puma store right there on the circuit track, among other recognizable landmarks like Radio City Music Hall, Central Park, Columbus Circle and more.

Despite the focus on NYC as a locality, the experience isn’t designed just for New Yorkers in mind. “Outside of just the business opportunity that exists here, we’re really excited about the visibility that this store brings, not just in New York but the international contingent,” Puma North America CEO Bob Philion to FN. The NYCGP supports its international visitors by letting racers select a country to represent, resulting in a global competition that reinforces the brand’s presence around the world.

Make a Connection Through Personalization

A strength of retail has historically been its service and attentiveness to consumers. While modern online shopping has enabled great improvements in relevance of product recommendations, in-store experiences infused with innovative tech provide a great opportunity to connect with consumers through emotionally driven experiences that build brand love.

Puma’s not alone in this shifting retail landscape. We’ve recently seen this shift occur led by some of the most iconic names in the space. Toys R Us may have shuttered its doors in the United States in 2018, for example, the retailer has bounced back as TRU Kids Brands, with plans for experiential store-within-a-store concept. Macy’s has piloted something similar with its Story concept, in which products featured follow a specific and ever-changing narrative. And of course, no one can forget Apple’s “town square” concept that effectively transforms the store into a community space for learning about how to make the most out of the company’s technology.

The Puma motorsport experience similarly builds connection with consumers because every interaction—from registration to queueing for a race to offboarding—is narrative-driven and infused with personalization. Tying each interaction to the brand promise is key to differentiation, and the NYCGP succeeds in motivating races and building excitement to compete as they await their turn on the circuit.

Retail just isn’t what it used to be. The Apple Store is no longer just a store, but is branded a “town center” where shoppers can pick up skills, and Amazon Go stores are revolutionizing retail by offering close integration with its website’s digital features. And it’s not just the future-focused tech brands that are reinventing retail; even the most stalwart retailers like Macy’s are poised to put their fun spin on the old formula, as seen in its new store-within-a-store, “Story.”

The thread that connects each of these developments is the effort to provide consumers with an experience as they shop. But while this discussion is still largely an abstract one in the west, the transformation from storefront to product showroom is already complete in eastern markets like China. “Going in-store gives customers the opportunity to see and interact with the brand’s products, but the purchasing is still usually done online here,” says Thomas Dohm, a Sr. Producer at MediaMonks based in Singapore.

The retailers Dohm is talking about have adapted to customer’s online shopping behaviors rather than try to fight against them. And this is a smart approach, because digital touchpoints and brick-and-mortar retail have a symbiotic effect on one another: in its “The Art And Science Of Retail eCommerce” report, Forrester Research estimates that “digital touchpoints impacted 51% of the $3.7 trillion total US retail market in 2018,” though only 14% of the US retail purchases occurred online, according to the same report.

These findings suggest that digital touchpoints play a significant role in offline purchasing decisions as well as online ones, which provides brick-and-mortar retailers an opportunity to better utilize digital (through which consumers often initiate product research) to support their business. In-store installations provide a unique way for brands to marry their digital strategies with in-store visits. Using two examples of in-store installations hailing from the east, we’re diving into what makes an effective, compelling experience that gets feet through the door.

Plan Around the Store Environment

Retailers must plan the in-store experience around the environments that will host them. A flagship location, for example, can offer plenty of space for high-profile experiential—and it may already attract throngs of shoppers who can participate and build buzz. Digital experiential can help put general store locations on the map, but retailers must understand the variables present—such as local market differences, square footage available, flow of foot traffic and more—when seeking to translate an experience across different stores.

“Local markets have all sorts of budgets, available space in store and of course maturity in experiential activation,” says Dohm. Dohm worked on a retail experience for Calvin Klein’s 37.5 line of thermoregulating jeans, which rolled out to APAC markets and walks users through a poetic VR experience that prompts them to reflect on temperature. This experience came in several tiers depending on the space and resources available in the stores where it was installed: “We approached the Calvin Klein 37.5 activation in a way that would be modular and flexible to cater to these factors,” says Dohm.

Retailers must begin by zeroing in on the core of the experience that would fit within any store—for the Calvin Klein installation, this included the VR headset and accompanying touchscreen device—then developing tiers of experience that enhance it where possible. With the Calvin Klein activation, for example, stores with the space to spare included a tiny house installation that drew attention and provided shoppers with a partitioned space to strap on the headset. In its largest iteration, dressing room-inspired places could be used to fully immerse the shopper.

The difference between experiences doesn’t have to be drastic. For example, Nike got shoppers running to six of their Chinese stores by prompting them to launch a rocket through the power of their sprint on a treadmill. At their flagship location in Shanghai, Nike offered a multiplayer variation in which users could compete with their friends. The difference here is minimal, yet adds a remarkable competitive layer on top of the experience by making the most of the space available.

Understand Local Market Differences

If you plan on rolling your experience out to several markets, don’t treat localization as an afterthought. Good localization isn’t just a matter of translating aspects of the experience; you’ll also need a clear understanding of behaviors that are unique to the different markets that you target. As retail provides a direct touchpoint for consumers to meet and engage with your brand on an individualized level, it’s crucial that your retail experience is relevant and comprehensible to local audiences.

This can be as innocuous as a registration form. The Calvin Klein 37.5 activation, which rolled out to four APAC markets, prompted users to provide contact details. For stores in China, it made sense to enable signups through WeChat—the reigning messaging app in China that many shoppers use as an e-wallet. For markets where WeChat is less common for retail and commerce, registration via email was the default channel. Brands should likewise identify the channels that are most popular or engaging for shoppers to understand the best way to tie the in-store experience back to an overall digital strategy.

Planning around the nuances of a local market at early stages of the creative process also highlights opportunities for transcreation to save time. An important feature of the Calvin Klein experience is a meditative narration that focuses the user’s attention on the temperature around them, prompting them to reflect on the elements, but the poetic narration posed a challenge for offering relevance among local audiences. “The nature of the experience was intentionally very abstract,” said Dohm. “But this was not something that translated easily into Mandarin, so we transcreated the copy to make it more pragmatic.” Effective transcreation enabled the team to roll out to all markets within eight weeks.

Give Shoppers Something to Take Away

Shoppers love to share their experiences, and in-store installations should support this need for maximum effectiveness. This not only reminds users of the product your experience promotes, but can also expand its reach by driving user-generated content (UGC) through social. While the main goal in providing a digital takeaway should be to commemorate the experience, providing a suggested hashtag or offering a digital portal that collects UGC can also prompt shares.

“It’s great to give people something to remember their experience by,” says Dohm. “If it was a positive experience, they’ll hopefully share that on social media channels.” Content that best fits this purpose is that which documents the experience: a photo, video or even a gif that captures the magic of the experience in a personalized way. The Calvin Klein activation lets users walk away with a heatmap selfie—a clever way to distill the experience’s concept behind the promoted thermoregulating jeans. The Nike experience, meanwhile, provides shoppers with a video of their sprint that includes their personal record to encourage sharing via WeChat.

In essence, digital retail experiences should not only inform shoppers, but provide a sense of fun. In-store experiential that pulls this off successfully delights consumers while helping them understand the unique features or value of your products. As retailers are still adapting to an industry disrupted by digital and ecommerce in the west, brick-and-mortar retailers should act now to carve out a space and land on top.

With an ever-quickening rate of technological change and new platforms emerging just as fast, it can be tough for businesses to adapt. Rather than reinvent the wheel, legacy businesses should strive to be themselves.

When it comes to digital transformation, legacy businesses are in a uniquely tight spot: they must consider how to provide new, innovative experiences while retaining the character, image and customer relationship that have worked so well thus far. In some cases, rigid brand standards and internal reluctance to change can squander customers’ relationship with even beloved brands. So how does one invest in digital transformation without losing what made them unique and successful? 

Take stock of customers’ needs and how you can meet them.

The first step in adopting a digital strategy is to keep a customer-centric focus. How can digital platforms add value for them on top of your existing IP and products? Which of your customers’ needs are unmet given the channels that are available to you today? In addition to focusing on customer habits and needs, you should keep an eye on competition for inspiration, benchmarks and to see where possibilities lie. Are there any ways you can provide an even better experience than them?

When envisioning the experience that you want to give customers, avoid a common pitfall that befalls some brands: the dubious assumption that digital transformation solely involves a flashy site or app. In fact, digital transformation is a multifaceted process that will require you to restructure the way you do business. So rather than just invest in a new website or app experience, you’ll need a much more integrated approach to how your core message is amplified across several touchpoints, media and other messaging. This also means restructuring your team a bit. One example of changes you might implement includes marrying your marketing and IT teams to ensure a smoother user experience on the web.

Use your stature to your advantage—but don’t be afraid of change.

Old habits die hard, but legacy businesses have one advantage over newer ones: decades of cultural relevance and consumer trust that they can draw upon when asserting themselves in a digital space. Take, for example, one of the most iconic toy brands of all time: LEGO. When children’s attention shifted from physical toys to smartphones and iPads, LEGO wasn’t going to go down without a fight. The big, bad wolf of digital media failed to huff, puff and blow the LEGO-brick house down. Instead, the Danish toymaker chose to follow the wind and invest heavily in apps, videogames and film. The digital transformation effort has proved so successful that it’s today regarded as the “Apple of toys.”

Niels B. Christiansen, LEGO CEO, mentioned in the LEGO Play Well Report 2018 that “today’s children are seamlessly merging what’s real and what’s virtual, reinventing play in ways people of my own generation could never have envisioned.” This inspired the brand to similarly blur the lines between physical and digital experiences. “We at LEGO are embracing that fluidity in play,” added LEGO CMO Julia Goldin, “and we want to have a bigger role in a child’s development” both online and off.

LEGO’s sophistication in digital platforms culminated in Nexo Knights, a toy franchise designed to hold children’s attention across an entire ecosystem of experiences and media including a TV series, a mobile app, retail VR experiences and a web game. The robust campaign introduced children to the world of the toy series—but even with the bells and whistles of a VR game and mobile app, the focus was still on the boxes of brightly colored, plastic bricks that kids could dive their fists into.

Some things simply aren’t replicated digitally, according to Sander van der Vegte, Head of Labs at MediaMonks Labs. “From the feeling of the bricks to the sound of them clicking together,” there are many physical elements to the beloved brick toy that would make it impossible to replace the physical aspect of play. The big question to consider with digital transformation is how digital can augment the experience or thing that people already love about your brand.

See how we pieced together the Nexo Knights launch brick-by-brick.

Don’t cling to legacy business models, but enhance them in a smart way.

Clinging to a legacy business model can be suicide amidst changing consumer habits. Companies that are early in the digital transformation process can prioritize tools, platforms and features that fit within their existing business model rather than try to reinvent the wheel or deny the changing tide of customer needs.

One aspect of the Nexo Knights campaign that shouldn’t be overlooked is that it invites customers to visit and explore LEGO retail stores in a couple of different ways—despite the fact that most toy sales are happening online rather than off. What sounds like a bad idea has proven fruitful for the brand. A keystone of the campaign is the Nexo Knights VR experience, which lets customers literally step into the IP’s world as soon as they walk through the doors of a LEGO store. After they became acquainted with the product, children were able to find power ups at stores that they could scan into the Nexo Knights app, enhancing their digital experience with in-store visits. With both assets, the brand leveraged digital tech to enhance brick-and-mortar retail and to encourage kids to see the products in-person. Who said retail was dead?

Digital transformation can certainly be intimidating—it forces you to take a long, hard look at the way you form relationships with customers and can even cannibalize your product. But adopting a digital strategy doesn’t have to result in an identity crisis. Sometimes the best strategy is to be yourself.

We all have a favorite barista: it’s the person who greets you every morning when you pick up your daily cup of coffee—and who already knows that you want just one spoonful of sugar and a splash of oat milk without having to ask.

The barista who’s attuned to their customers’ preferences is a classic example of the power of personalization. Able to minimize friction at the point of sale or aid in product discovery, personalization has a significant impact on customers’ experience when done well: according to Forrester, “Retailers that use omnichannel customer data to deliver unique value to customers and resolve pain points set themselves up to build brand loyalty and create great commerce experiences.”

This is a best-case scenario for ecommerce platforms. “What’s really exciting is capturing your marketing audience through personalized media,” says Remco Vroom, Business Lead for Platforms & ecommerce at MediaMonks HQ. “Then, we can capture them in a similarly personalized way on your website and storefront,” creating a holistic customer experience.

The Genesis car configurator released last year, for example, lets users personalize the car’s specifications and see the results in a 3D model in an experience that rivaled the configurations you’d see in a videogame—all within a web browser. “But what really made the tool special was that it tied to the back-end,” says Vroom. “Users could save their configuration, which is sent to the closest dealership for them to actually buy.” That ability to port preferences and information from one channel or source to another can be powerful when extended across numerous touch points, delivering relevancy every step of the way.

Catch Attention with Detailed Messaging Tailored to Preference

Delivering personalized assets across the consumer journey can certainly seem overwhelming and intimidating. That’s why we’ve developed a new creative framework for delivering vast amounts of content with minimal rework and designed for transcreation, ensuring that organizations don’t need a heavy share of resources to provide relevant, customized messaging to their audiences. It all boils down to starting with an overall structure or narrative, then identifying the variables you can customize per audience—a bit like filling in the blanks of a Mad Libs story using a pre-defined word bank.

You can see this in action with the dynamic video campaign we made for Amazon Prime’s The Grand Tour series. The process was simple: we made 12 edits highlighting different aspects of the show, each of which would appeal differently to audience segments. We then cut up those edits and stitched them back together using Google’s Vogon tool, resulting in 88 different videos tailored to specific user profiles.

Enhance the Customer Experience Through Recommendations

Attracting customers’ attention is one thing, but once they visit your store, personalized recommendation engines can help them quickly discover the products most relevant to them.

One brand that has done a great job in optimizing product discovery is beauty brand OPI. Its Nail Clinic Healthy Nails Quiz, made in collaboration with MediaMonks, helps consumers learn how to take care of their specific nail issues or woes by answering a few questions. This process is fast and easy, with each question limiting responses to only two options. For example, do their nails bend easily? Are they prone to breaking, or peeling? After completing the questionnaire, the tool provides them with a nail treatment product suited to their needs.

“The purpose of the tool is to diagnose nail problems, then educate customers on how they can fix them,” says Cynthia Lin, Program Director at MediaMonks LA.  “For example, if you have a weak nail, the application can recommend a treatment product to strengthen it before putting a color on.” The process is evocative of talking to a shopping assistant at a brick-and-mortar store, offering personalized, one-on-one attention that’s often missed within a digital environment.

Keep a Balance Between Search and Discovery

One thing to keep in mind when embracing personalization in ecommerce is to allow plenty of room for organic discovery. While recommendation engines can be great for helping users immediately find relevant results, you don’t want your customers to feel like they’ve given up their autonomy or control.

So how does one strike the balance? OPI has a tool similar to the Healthy Nails Quiz that allows users to “try on” any of the colors in the nail catalogue. The quiz-based approach—which asks about things like skin tone, nail length, preferred color family and more—fits well within the brand’s content strategy to help customers discover products in a fun, accessible way.

After completing the quiz, users receive color recommendations and alongside an image that helps them visualize it on their own hand.  But customers aren’t forced to accept those results; they’re invited to go back and change responses or freely explore the colors available, opening up the opportunity to freely browse and discover after being matched with a recommendation.

“This tool lets users explore color based on their skin tone, which is important in the world of nail polish and beauty,” says Lin. “It addresses an issue that many people face, allowing us to cater toward a more diverse range of audiences.” As Lin says, representation is incredibly important to the beauty industry: consumers must set expectations for how a given product will make them look, and what types of bodies or skin tones are represented can have the effect of setting beauty standards. The image, which changes based on the user’s inputted skin tone and nail length, also demonstrates the usefulness of personalized assets like those mentioned above.

That really drives home the power of a personalized ecommerce platform: customers can better identify with a given product or envision it in their lives. Through personalized messaging and more relevant product selections, ecommerce brands can meet users’ needs before, during and after a sale—and forge deeper, more lasting connections in the process.

There’s no denying that online retailers make shopping more convenient, but in some ways the digital shopping experience falls short. For one, you can’t try on clothing or fashion accessories before having them shipped to your door, which means you might discover after days of waiting that something doesn’t fit. To get around this, customers might buy several versions of an item in different sizes, which can be costly to them in the immediate term while contributing to scarcity of high-demand items—for example, sneaker releases, which have generated $20 billion in U.S. sales alone in 2017 and have a resale market valued at over $1 billion.

There has to be a way to instill purchasing confidence in consumers, which is why one of the latest projects to come out of MediaMonks Labs, our internal R&D team, is an AR tool that uses computer vision to accurately measure shoppers’ feet. While it may not sound like the most exciting use of AR (no, it won’t transport virtual monsters to your living room or render a shoe directly on your feet), “it speaks a lot to what else we do beyond the crazier stuff,” says Joe Mango, Creative Technologist at MediaMonks Labs. “We explore things where there’s need, and see how feasible—or infeasible—it is. There’s high interest in exploration and discovery.”

Sander van der Vegte, who leads the Labs team, discusses the importance for more practical uses of the tech in both its adoption and signaling value to consumers: “Everyone’s pushing AR, but why is it useful? This tool is designed purely to solve a specific problem, and is functional in doing so.”

Improving CX with a “Form Follows Function” Approach

While most people are aware of their shoe size, fits aren’t so cut and dry; shoppers often get some shoes in one size and some in another. “Shoe shopping becomes more complicated when different brands and shoes have different sizing charts, making it harder to gauge what fits,” says Mango, who brought the tool to life. It can get around this issue by automatically translating a unit measurement into a specific brand’s sizing chart, giving the perfect size recommendation as users shop online. Ideally, the tool could exist within a retailer’s app, seamlessly aligned with the browsing process.

The tool has practical value for both consumers and retailers alike: shoppers know their purchase will fit before they buy it, and retailers don’t have to foot the bill of processing returns. This also means customers don’t have to worry about being blacklisted from making frequent returns, either—a fail-safe measure some retailers have used that erodes consumer trust and confidence. But perhaps most importantly, the tool serves as example for how retailers can use emerging technology to give consumers an obvious reason to provide their data. In this case, the length of their foot improves and optimizes the customer’s journey by enabling them to make the right purchasing decision.

Improving Measurements with Computer Vision

It’s worth noting that measuring via AR isn’t an entirely new capability: Apple, for example, integrates an AR “tape measurer” into the current version of iOS. While the feature is great for measuring perfectly straight lines or edges, it’s not the most accurate tool of measuring the length of a foot: there’s a lot of user error in moving the phone and finding the right angle to measure the foot.

The tool built by MediaMonks Labs is powered by OpenCV (a programming library for computer vision) and takes a different approach. Starting with a top-down photo of the user’s foot, it uses edge detection to determine and outline its shape. It then compares the size of that shape to a reference object whose size is defined and absolute—for example, a ubiquitous coin—which results in a consistently accurate measurement. While the output is in units of inches or centimeters, the tool has the potential to translate these measurements to brands’ custom sizing charts, taking the guesswork out of determining what fits.

Taking the Next Steps in Consumer-Friendliness

While the value of the AR tool is clear, added steps can be taken to improve usability. “There is a caveat to this method of measurement,” says Mango. “You need a flat color-contrasted background for accuracy,” which helps the computer vision model detect the foot’s edges.

Mango also discovered that the tool had difficulty differentiating a foot from the rest of a leg. The solution was simple: by wearing ankle socks he could segment the two with consistent accuracy. These limitations, along with the requirement of a universal reference object, present opportunities to make the tool more user-friendly for commercial use.

Despite its current limitations, the tool shows how brands might identify common issues on both the business and consumer side of the equation, then implementing technology in new creative, new ways to solve them. In the immediate term, these unique applications can provide the retailer with brand equity through emerging technology’s novelty. More importantly, though, they can deliver a better online or offline shopping experience to customers.