Smart Summit London, now in its third year, will take place on the 19th and 20th of September at the Business Design Centre in London. Over 180 visionary speakers will join over 1,500 attendees to discuss the impact of IoT and Connected Living on homes, cities, insurance, utilities, retail and LPWAN.
One of the Smart Retail Summit speakers, Joost Fromberg is the Data Driven Optimisation Lead at Online Dialogue. Joost, who will be discussing ‘Illusions of Thought. How to Influence Consumer Behaviour?’ took some time to complete a Speaker Q&A:
How is IoT transforming your business?
Marketers love data. We can access data at scale, but we always need to look for the bigger picture and not specifically personal data. Therefore, we look at which point in the funnel the drop-off is the highest, or whether we see a difference in buying intent from various sources of traffic. However, IoT gives us so much more data than we could ever imagine. As a consultancy firm, we need to be on alert for new trends and opportunities, and that's why we're for example currently experimenting with the Amazon Echo and the possibilities for improving online communication or improving customer service.
Please can you share examples of retailers making maximum benefit of new technologies?
Right now, we aren't seeing many retailers using these new technologies yet, but only a couple of companies are exploring the field. The bigger firms are using a social media login, smart CRM systems to also track offline behaviour or target their marketing outings based on weather, but the options are endless. From my point of view, visceral state is something that's next. With all the smart watches and activity trackers, we might be able to do interesting marketing activities based on a person's visceral state. Psychological research shows us that we behave differently in different moods, and we're more open for new experiences when we're happy or angry. Here we have a cool new opportunity to better spend your marketing budget.
Which new services and solutions are being offered to customers thanks to digital technology advances?
Proactivity. So much data is being tracked and so many devices are connected nowadays that companies are able to proactively push important information to customers, a high blood pressure, or that your current route has a large traffic jam. The options are endless, but the main idea is that companies have so much data to proactively help out the customer.
Which retail strategies are most successful for selling Smart Home products?
Smart Home products are currently a luxury good, but over the next couple of years will become a mainstream product. Right now, in order to sell Smart Home products, you're talking to a specific group of people: the early adopters. This group of people is not buying a product, they're buying an experience and something they can show others. Thus, framing your product as being entirely new (not comparable to anything you've seen so far), offering the chance of sharing stuff on social media and use storytelling in your marketing communication are just a couple tips you can definitely use. During my talk, I'll dive more into different techniques retailers can exploit in order to sell more.
What more can be done to increase mass market take-up of Smart Home products and solutions?
Price, ease and time. Right now, Smart Home products and solutions are a luxury good and the majority of people won't pay €100+ for Philips Hue lights if you can just use regular lights. That's also because they don't see the added value: to really benefit from the Philips Hue lights, you need to have them connected to your Echo, Apple Home, Siri etc. So many consumers don't understand all these integrations yet, and the younger crowd who does understand it, doesn't have the money yet to spend that much on Smart Home products. So, if we're able to educate the non-tech-savvy consumers into how you can best use these products, get the prices down to have a bigger market and wait a little bit longer for masses to catch on, we're going to have a massive market ready to adopt everything.
About Smart Summit London
Smart Summit is a 2 day conference and exhibition covering the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem and its impact on the digital society.
Now in its 3rd year, the event features Europe's leading Smart Home Summit and a further 5 tracks all designed to compliment each other.
With over 180 visionary speakers, gain a unique insight from industry heavyweights and hear case study examples from major contributors.
Make sure you are present in London on the 19th and 20th September for THE Smart IoT event of 2017.
