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In a marble-pillared drawing room at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, 16 startups entered a pitch battle to convince three judges that they should be given the closing slot on the WIRED Retail 2015 main stage.
On the judging panel were Rowland Manthorpe, associate editor of WIRED, Bindi Karia, a startup expert, mentor and financier, and Cheyney Robinson, chief creative officer of Europe at IBM Interactive Experience. With a nine minute slot each, the retail businesses took the stage and made their pitches to a full room.
Below, WIRED reporters Cara McGoogan, Emily Reynolds and Nicole Kobie summarise what was said.
Big Data for Humans
- Founded: 2015
- Founders: Peter Ellen, Steve Rose
- Location: London
At the heart of modern marketing is the ability to segment your customer groups, so you know exactly what campaigns work on each type of shopper. Big data analysis makes that possible, and Big Data for Humans looks to make it easier for retailers of all sizes, from independent shops to giants such as Tesco, one of its first customers.
Running those comparisons isn't easy, and normally requires specialist data scientists. Founder Peter Ellen described his idea as a "data science as a service solution for people who aren't data scientists." It pulls in sales data, assigns it to your individual customers, and outputs reports that can be read by marketing and executives who aren't data analysis experts. Because Big Data for Humans is cloud based, it can scale its computing resources to chew through as many customer records as a retailer holds, he said.
Presence Orb
- **Location:**London
Presence Orb is a cloud-based platform that gives retailers detailed analytics of how customers are engaging with their physical stores. It tracks shoppers using surveillance technologies, including sensors that map the wireless signals of mobile phones, and in-store cameras. Using this information, plus third-party data, it can provide a breakdown of how long people stay in the store, how many people are passing through, when they return, and how they interact with the shop's products.
Presence Orb is active in a few hundred stores, tracking 2.5 million devices a day with its wireless access points, Sheppard told WIRED Retail. It knows when 30 percent of those devices return to stores, and can detect about 75 percent of all customers at the moment.
Sheppard gave WIRED Retail an example of the kind of analysis Presence Orb can provide: 70 percent of visitors to Oxford Street shops won't go to the basement, especially if the store doesn't have an escalator or lift.
After a privacy scandal in 2013, Presence Orb has vowed to only work in private spaces, have signs at the places where they're monitoring, and have a global opt out option. It has also signed up to privacy groups, and adheres to UK privacy rules, according to Sheppard.
Taggstar
- Founded: 2010
- Founders: Fraser Robinson
- Location: London
According to Taggstar's managing director Marjorie Leonides, Taggstar is "retail's killer app". The app delivers real time messages to consumers that provide information about trending items and audience popularity and give customers a way to engage with a brand's products. It does this by giving customers notifications and emoticons to show how many people are looking at an item, how many people have bought it and what's going fast. It can also give customers a push notification for a price alert in cases like airline tickets, prices of which often increase dramatically.
The power of social proof can't be underestimated -- last Black Friday and Cyber Monday, consumers spent £1.07billion and £943million respectively. Black Friday proved an interesting challenge for Taggstar -- "how could we deal with trends when retailers are coming out with new products hour by hour?".
The way customers buy is changing too, says Leonides. According to research undertaken by Taggstar, it now takes customers double the amount of time to make buying decisions due to the glut of products available to them. Taggstar, Leonides says, helps customers with this overwhelming choice.
When using Taggstar, one company saw a 2.7% uplift in sales -- a £14million uplift. The real challenge, Leonides says, is differentiating merchants from one another. "How do you enable customers to love your brand when so few websites take so much of the revenue?".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
