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7ANNUAL REPORT 2014 Deutsche EuroShop SHOPPING loyalty points. No one wants to use the tech- nology solely as a way of targeting bargain hunters. It is also – some would say mainly – about providing better service. To use a stereo- type as an example: men have to wait for their wives or girlfriends while they try on shoes or clothes. While they are waiting, they listlessly look at their smartphones. With a beacon, re- tailers can offer them music, films or magazines to stop them from getting bored and suggesting to their wives that it’s time to leave the shop. As soon as the user is out of the beacon’s range, the media stop playing. Don’t shout at customers As with many new technologies, there is a risk of overkill at the beginning. If every retailer in a shopping center uses beacons and advertises special offers, customers’ smartphones will vibrate every time they pass a shop window, making them feel like they are being “shouted at” and, ultimately, driving them away. “We have to move from push marketing to pull mar- keting,” says Torsten Jensen. With his compa- ny Asandoo, he advises retailers on the imple- mentation of their beacon strategy. The ideal scenario is for customers to open the mall app and independently check what offers are avail- able that day or where they can find the product they are looking for. Of course, it also makes sense to appeal to smartphone users’ play in- stinct. Customers have to locate a certain prod- uct and scan the barcode on the packaging in or- der to receive points or a discount. The benefit is that customers have to pick up and handle the product to scan it. Will it work? The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. There is no single, “correct” way to use beacons. The technology leaves scope for marketing professionals to express their creativity. But there is a snag: the name. “We advise our clients to avoid the word ‘beacon’. It just confuses most consumers,” says Jensen. With words such as “WLAN”, “app” and “Bluetooth”, there are already enough technical Anglicisms in the German language. So if, on top of all of that, the mall app asks us- ers to also allow beacons access to their phones, many will refuse out of fear or uncertainty. Users do not care what the technology is called. But they need to know what is in it for them: be it customised offers, discounts, entertainment or simply convenience. Once they do, it’s just a matter of tapping “OK” when the app asks their permission. C One of Future Labs’ popular, well-established offerings is its 3D store guide system. Anything that benefits customers and enhances their shopping experience is indispensable – both today and tomorrow. Mall naviga- tion system Click & Collect Not only does it offer a search feature for shops and individual product groups on a large touchscreen, but it also offers visitors the option of having the route to the shops they are looking for displayed on their own smartphones as a 3D graphic. In future, this service will be enhanced by an indoor navi- gation feature linked to Google Maps. It will show the user’s precise location and consid- erably simplify their navigation through the shopping center. The malls’ floor plans plus shop information will gradually be added to Google Maps, as well. Experiments involving iBeacons are also underway. iBeacons are small transmitters spread throughout the malls, similar to satellites for a GPS system. The sys- tem needs these to determine a user’s precise location, something that is not always possi- ble with the standard signals used by Google Maps due to buildings’ enclosed structures and multiple levels. iBeacons can help local- ise the malls’ visitors and conveniently guide them to their target destinations. C The service currently being tested by ECE might just be one of those: the “Click & Collect” feature not only lets shoppers view products via the Love to Shop app, it also lets them purchase and pay for them immediately. The merchandise can then be picked up from the corresponding shop in the center, either on the same day or at a later point in time. This marks the first time that an app lets shoppers make round-the-clock purchases in shopping centers. More than 40 tenants are taking part in this pilot project including concepts such as Bang&Olufsen, Lloyd, Napapijri, Saturn, WMF and Wolford. The lack of networking between the retailers’ inventory management systems complicated matters. Retailers’ in- troduction of an iPad inventory management and POS system now allows the inventories of participating shops to be displayed in real time in the ECE app. The payment process was integrated into the app in cooperation with Paypal. C E CE’s two Future Labs have successfully tested two new offerings which will now be finding their way into numerous other shopping centers. One of those is an expan- sion of malls’ WLAN networks, the other is the new “Love to shop” app. During the test phase at both the Alstertal-Einkaufszentrum Hamburg and Limbecker Platz Essen, 25,000 visitors downloaded this app and made intense use of it. Interest from retailers, too, is also huge. More than 250 leasing partners have al- ready used the medium to position their products and services. By the end of 2014, some 30 ECE shopping centers had already been provided with this indi- vidualisable app, including a few centers from the portfolio of Deutsche EuroShop such as the Allee- Center Magdeburg, the Altmarkt-Galerie Dresden, the City-Arkaden Wuppertal, the Main-Taunus- Zentrum and the Rhein-Neckar-Zentrum. The app is available for iPhones and Android smartphones and can be downloaded from app stores at no charge under the name “Love to shop”. This app provides mall visitors with offers from retailers that are customised to reflect their own per- sonal needs plus information about sales, events, news and services offered in the mall. With this app, customers only receive offers for product ranges that are of particular interest to them. A geo-fencing feature ensures that the information only actively appears on customers’ smartphones when they are in the vicinity of the mall. Using the app is doubly beneficial for customers: Not only is it a source of valuable information, but using the app interactively can earn them points which they can then redeem for shop- ping center vouchers. Customers can earn additional points by sharing spe- cial offers in social networks or for specifying their gender, age and per- sonal interests to ensure that only of- fers which are actually of interest make it onto their smartphones. This is en- tirely anonymous and voluntary, and no personal data is collected. Efforts are underway to establish America’s most widely used shop- ping app, shopkick, in Germany. Since its German launch in October 2014, more than 530,000 users (as at 13 Jan- uary 2015) have downloaded the app, much to the joy of the partner branch- es. Shopkick rewards its users for visit- ing a partner store, referred to as a walk- in, by awarding bonus points (kicks). Shoppers in Berlin were particular- ly delighted to have shopkick as their mobile companion during Christmas shopping and generated the highest number of walk-ins, followed closely by shoppers in Hamburg and Munich. Kicks earned through walk-ins can be exchanged for rewards. Vouchers from Douglas, iTunes, MediaMarkt and Saturn were popular in Decem- ber 2014. C Shopping – not without my app Links Love to Shop www.app-love-to-shop.de Shopkick www.shopkick.de » No one wants to use the technology solely as a way of targeting bargain hunters. How do beacons work? Beacons are mini-transmitters. They are about the size of a cigarette packet and run off a button cell battery. This means that beacons can be installed anywhere using an adhesive strip. The only time it is necessary to access a beacon is when its battery needs changing. The beacon’s signal is based on the Bluetooth Low Energy standard (Ver- sion 4.0), which is supported by nearly all common smartphone and tablet models. Bluetooth is set up to transmit data in the immediate vicinity: it is already familiar to users because of its deployment in headsets, keyboards and in-car hands-free sys- tems. The beacon sends out its “hello, I’m here” signal at intervals of milliseconds. If a customer is within range and has a smartphone with a corresponding, active app, they receive a message. The message is not stored in the beacon itself, as it has no memory. Instead, the greeting or discount offer is carried either in the app or via the smartphone’s Internet connection. If the store operator wants to send information that is as up-to-date as possible, perhaps changing depending on the time of the day, customers need to have a mobile data or WLAN connection. C Shopping apps, long used in the US, are now also being successfully introduced in Germany. What can the two most important apps do? by Dirk Kunde