2011 - Retail gets personal

In December, I started a series of blog posts on e-commerce trends for 2011, covering m-commerce and multi-channel convergence.

However, I saved one great trend for this year: personalization. I see several technologies coming together to create the foundation for a wave of innovation within personalized retailing in 2011 and beyond.

To understand the importance of this shift, look at the evolution of the store. The bricks and mortar store was traditionally seen as “your store” so to speak – a store designed after the retailer’s preferences. Social commerce (ratings, reviews, Q&A etc) made it “our store” – designed by the shopper community. Shoppers could now influence the store content to make it better suit their needs, but still in a collective fashion. With personalization, it will finally be “my store”, one shop for each individual, tailored to their personal preferences and needs.

As just one of many examples of personalization, the adoption of behavioral merchandising technology is accelerating everywhere.

However, there’s a lot of potential left for retailers to become better at connecting customers with relevant items and utilising all their data to deliver sophisticated marketing and merchandising techniques. Personalized product recommendations will move from being on web pages and will increasingly be utilized in advertising, emails and even call centres. Even traditional retailing will eventually change. In the future bricks and mortar stores could use digital displays to allow for quick changes to be made to pricing and marketing messages, matching their merchandising to the customers visiting the store just then.

But personalization is larger than just Avail’s field, and examples are plenty. Fits.me has created an innovative technology to enables online shoppers to see exactly how clothes will fit their body. Puma recently invested “a 7-figure amount” to create Creative Factory, a new program that lets shoppers design their own, personalized trainers in 3D using iPads, and then have them made to order. A veritable army of new fashion retailers – Spreadshirt, Tailorstore, ASuitThatFits just to name a few – let shoppers design custom-made clothes online, choosing from a huge array of cloths and styles. I’m sure this is just the beginning.

However, for all the benefits of personalization technology for shoppers and retailers alike, it can still create a consumer backlash if used in the wrong way. Despite the good intentions, and the fact that many applications – like ours – rely on anonymous data, retailers and technology vendors have little to gain from ignoring shoppers requests for privacy. Putting consumers in control, and being transparent about business practices, will be the order of the day in 2011.