Super-marts! Super-charged!

 

Recently I visited the French super-mart Carrefour in Singapore (Suntec City), and was amused to see the electronic display tags on the shelves showing the price of the items. The tags looked trivial and cheap, but still were very interesting as this is the first time I have seen something of that sort in Singapore. These were little tags with a little monochrome green color LCD screen displaying the prices, replacing the paper based printed tags.

 

 

I took a picture to put on this blog (above), and did a bit of non-intrusive investigation on how the tags work, I couldn’t figure out if they had a provision for connecting to a device for updating the prices, or is they were enabled with WLAN/BT to receive price updates, or if there was any proximity chip inside. But anyway, this is good idea with many possibilities – imagine if the tags can be updated remotely, and they can display bright color screens with animated graphics to attract attention, and show promotions. I am sure the manufactures must have thought of these bells-n-whistles, but I guess the key issue here is the cost of manufacturing these tags – the benchmark is against no-tech printed paper tags, tough. Or, else, is the amount and effort spent on manual labor (translating into cost savings) to update the paper tags by walking thought the aisles is sufficient enough to justify a replacement with high-tech more advanced electronic tags? I don’t know …please comment below if you have some clues.

 

Talking about the super-marts – these are probably one of the most efficient businesses around (besides automobile assembly, electronics manufacturing, airlines route planning etc), where ‘economies of scale’ drives the profit to a large extent, not so much by generating extra revenues but by managing costs. Additionally, the competition is killer anyway – most surviving super-mart businesses have found suppliers who provide cheapest prices for the goods, they have already hooked up with transportation companies that provide lowest shipping costs, they rely on heavy automation and least man-power to run operations, the distribution centers and retails outlets are already placed strategically to reach maximum customer base, and the markets and geographies are pretty much saturated due to globalization.

 

Hmmm, the playing field does not really leave any more room to grow (besides new markets and new stores), attract new customers and more importantly retain current ones. Where is customer loyalty when same goods are available at different super-mart chains and probably at comparatively similar price! How do the super-marts attract new customers and hold on to the current ones – poor CEO, screaming at the product strategy, marketing and operations teams all the time, and the analysts are watching like hawks, earnings, profits? Interesting. Well, what that really caught my attention to get around today’s tough competitive landscapes is – INNOVATION. Thinking out-of-the-box? Well there is no box in first place! Look at this…

 

 

INNOVATION. Stay in the game!

 

When nothing else cuts, some companies (Stop-n-Shop) go to this extent – creating a need for something that really doesn’t exist (not sure enough to call it ‘blue-ocean’, but lets call it ‘a-great-idea’ for now). We still go shopping groceries and pick up an empty basket, it all works, but but but, how nice is to buy groceries with this assistant. Again, ‘imagine the possibilities’:

 

• You can create your groceries shopping list on a personalized website, and save it for future use, no hassle, no re-work, most of us usually buy same stuff every weekend!

• You go to the store, pick up a trolley and log-in, yes, to the wireless enabled touch screen dashboard

• Your groceries shopping list that you have already prepared shows up on the screen, wow

• The dashboard also guides you to the aisles and shelves where your specific items are located (guys, take note!)

• You pick up a bottle of milk for $1, the dashboard displays that 02 bottles are selling for $1.80, good deal! you pick up 02 bottles now (btw, the store has just made you spend $0.80 that you never planned initially …up-sell!)

• You locate another important consumable and the dashboard shows you that there will a ‘sale’ of that item next month (the store just made you come back to the store in future, stickiness, loyalty?)

• The dashboard application tracks your buying pattern, and when you pickup few polythene packs of grams, sugar, floor etc – it prompts you to a Tupperware containers area (you think, yes, I need them too to store these items, you buy a few – the store just did a cross-sell to you)

• You are happy that you managed to pick up all you wanted in record time

• You proceed to the check-out counter and there is no one there to swap all your items using a laser-gun, thats slow …as you were shopping, the total value of the cart is already calculated, you just pay and go, or maybe your personal login account is linked to your debit account, you just enter PIN, settled!

• You load your groceries into your car boot, log-off the cart and way back home for afternoon nap …ooops, forgot to log-off the cart, may be the cart is equipped with a proximity sensor linked to a key-chain that you received while signing up for your store’s online service, no worries, as you leave the cart behind and drive off, you are logged-off automatically. Peace of mind.

• Ha ha ha, life is sweet :)

 

 

 

This Innovation brought to you by IBM & Cuesol. Above described are strictly my personal views.