I am surprised it has taken so long for the marketing professionals to explicitly recognise and exploit the behaviour people have been exhibiting for decades, to check something out in a store with good staff and good advice, and then go down the road to a cheaper supplier to buy it. We don't have to go outside the Dixons empire to see the whole history. I used to got to Currys, make a decision (when Currys still had good staff who had some idea of what they were selling and could tell you more than was just printed on the sticker), and then go and buy it 50 metres away in Dixons. Then of course Dixons bought Currys and the saga moved on to their other wing, PC World, which was their first major campaign using the web in harmony with the store. Dixons group has played the evolution of the web very well and this new campaign is just the next phase. It is no big surprise they are the first company to start it in any big way. It's just surprising that no other company has done it bigger, better, earlier, given how obvious the evolution route is.
So, what's next? Pretty obvious really. And I expect Dixons will probably be in the front runners here too, though probably not the first next time.
Now that we are seeing the first glimmerings of augmented reality, where you can hold out your phone and see graphics showing where the tube stations are, it is a short hop to overlaying marketing data onto video visors. It sort of works with a phone screen, but it is too small and too much effort to use, so the market won't really take off properly until visors become commonplace. Once the augmented reality market reaches critical mass, which won't be very long, you will be able to browse products in a store, point your phone at them, and see how much it costs with another store. So you could do that in John Lewis, and see how much Dixons charges, and order it from there. Booksellers already suffer from some customers scanning barcodes on their books and ordering them directly from the web at a discount, but that is nowhere near as intuitive as it will be using augmented reality.
Augmented reality will allow full-blown digital trespassing. Getting a price for a product is one thing, and will certainly get the market moving, but imagine being in Marks and Spencer and seeing the clothes on sale in their competitors right alongside. A tiny amount of AI is needed to determine which products to set alongside, but it will happen. It will be just like Next having their clothes racks in Marks and Spencer right beside theirs. And vice versa of course.
Of course, marketers will encourage security to block wireless and mobile signals so that they can't carry real-time connections from competitors, but it is easy to bypass that. Mobiles will have plenty of memory, and will be quite capable of downloading enormous databases of competing products before the shopper leaves home. Of course, that also means they don't have to leave home, but we know from experience that people still like to visit real shops for all kinds of reasons even though they have broadband web at home.
Actually, although the first battles will be interesting, I expect the whole market will quickly adapt. Companies will know what brings people to their stores and will still be able to make advantage from that. Even if people can shop around more easily, it doesn't mean and end to diversity in the high street. New technology is mainly a threat to companies that refuse to adapt. For good companies, the battle just moves on, and competition thrives. Bring it on! And congratulations to Dixons for opening the next phase. But you know what? I'll still only buy from Dixons sometimes, sometimes not.
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