Trends 2010 - Part 4

Following on from our article with Design Week, here is the fourth part of the upcoming trends for 2010.

Permission marketing
It's Saturday morning and your store is empty. Whilst staring out of the window watching potential customers wander by, you wonder why they aren't in your store. If only you could get them in through the door, they'd realise what they were missing. But how?

The futurist film makers would have us believe that whilst walking through a shopping mall of the future, cameras will recognise who we are and then interactive video screens will talk to us directly about stuff that interests us. Thus making us enter their store.



This is essentially permission marketing (PM). Theorised by the marketing guru Seth Godin, permission marketing is the ability to send your customers personal messages because they have given you their consent to do so. It has been widely used by online marketers but not so much in the real world.

In today's world, cameras may not be able to recognise our eyes just yet (thankfully) but there are other forms of PM. The simplest form would be through use of mobile phones. 85% of adults in the UK carry a mobile phone and it has become one of the closest technologies in our day-to-day lives.

If you can get your customers permission and their mobile number, then you can send them a text message that contains a driver to encourage them to visit your store. This could be a discount code, the launch of new products or a celebrity signing. It could be anything that would interest that person.



With the recent launch of The Voucher Cloud app, there is clearly a demand for this type of decision-driver information. The Voucher Cloud allows customers to search their surroundings through a GPS phone for any restaurants that are offering discounts off food and drinks. Just show the restaurant the screen and you'll get your discount.

This GPS ability would allow retailers to go one step closer to the Minority Report with 'live permission marketing'. Through active IT systems you would know if a registered customers was about to walk past your store and it would send them a personalised message. For example "hello Steve, we see you're about to pass our Oxford Street store. Pop in and we'll give you 10% off any purchase".

This type of marketing is to be treated with respect thoguh. It is a privilege to have such one-to-one access to your customers and it must be used effectively. If you start to annoy customers with the technology then you'll lose them forever.

However, get it right and your store may never be empty again!