I have worked in omnichannel retail for about a decade, from gargantuan supermarkets to scrappy startups. I have spent enough time on the other side of the table of SaaS companies pitching me their product to understand what is useful and what is vapourware with a pretty neuromorphic colour scheme.
I joined Coniq because I think our product is the former and because I believe the future of physical retail is dependent on democratising access to this type of technology.
Loyalty and personalisation are dependent on input and output: how well do I know someone, and what can I do with that information. In this, the FAANG’s (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) have an accelerating advantage – they know us better than we know ourselves.
One area, however, where that advantage has not become dominant is in physical retail, where there remains a need for a patchwork of brands, retailers and food outlets with a complex mesh of events, location and experience, which is still too messy and organic to be replaced by an Amazon listing page.
When I first started working as a Product Manager for a supermarket’s online grocery delivery app, I was in the enviable position of knowing what kind of baked beans any visitor to my app had purchased from their local supermarket in the 90s. We had an immediate and unfair advantage on the competition. However, managing that data and spitting out some useful outputs was the work of a team of hundreds, with sometimes archaic storage methodologies and the inevitable heritage of a thousand well-intentioned architectural shortcuts.
That’s why building a powerful solution like IQ Connect, which puts those same capabilities in the hands of anyone who wants it, for a fraction of the cost and training, can level the playing field dramatically. Enabling far smaller organisations to leapfrog the decades of complexity and build up rich databases of engaged customers in weeks, not decades.
I’ve sat in meetings with omnichannel organisations when physical-retail managers have to take the stand after their digital counterparts and talk to a fraction of the data. “We’re making less money, and we don’t really know why”, or “we’re making more money, and we still don’t know why”. Our tech stack helps bridge that informational divide by enabling physical retailers to move intentionally, talking to segments and demographics that have long been out of reach of the physical retailer.
The pandemic has ravaged the spaces where we meet, countless businesses have struggled, and for a year or more, we’ve seen ghostly post-apocalyptic images of abandoned destinations we usually associate with fevered pre-Christmas excitement.
However, the enduring need for people to connect in person is clear, as countries have started to open up. We’ve seen queues of people desperate to resume the ritual of physical retail, putting lie to the dominance of pure-play online shopping.
Increasingly, we see that our clients want online presences that complement and augment their physical presence. This requires more than a boiler-plate shopping feed. The experiential goal posts have shifted to reflect a customer’s holistic engagement with a brand and a place. Coniq can help bridge the informational gap between these worlds in a way that only a few years ago was impossible for all but the largest teams of engineers and architects.
Here at Coniq, we see opportunity in this historical tipping point. Retailers that thrive in the new environment in the coming months and years will be those who have adapted and renewed themselves, creating omnichannel experiences, not shops, knowing why they are creating them and for whom.
If you’re a product manager or a product designer who is excited by the scale of this challenge, who would like to be a part of a company trying to bring back the high street, then let me know – I’d love to speak to you. We have regular pizza too.
