This smartphone marketing strategy brings digital capabilities into the real world.
The Lord & Taylor’s smartphone app now gives consumers the ability to use their devices to scan print ad photos to be able to learn about them and purchase them over mobile commerce, without ever having to visit its website.
The goal of this smartphone shopping strategy is to engage customers and boost sales.
The retailer is aiming to boost the engagement that they achieve with their customers, while they encourage a larger number of sales over mobile commerce through the use of the standard, traditional form of print advertising that has nearly always been used. The parent company of Lord & Taylor’s, the Hudson’s Bay Co. (HBC), had implemented its mobile app back at the start of this year. Now it gives consumers the opportunity to scan the pictures that they see in print, using their smartphones, so that they can purchase those products right away.
This mobile commerce strategy stops shoppers from having to go to the retailer’s website to look up the item.
The point is to provide a more seamless experience and reduce the number of steps that are required in order to make a purchase. Instead of requiring a consumer to remember what they saw in a print ad and take the additional steps to actually look it up and buy it from the website, later on, they can make the purchase right away with their smartphones, eliminating that extra step.
According to Ryan Craver, the HBC senior vice president of corporate strategy, this m-commerce move is “about making everything in the store shoppable off someone’s mobile phone.” He went on to add that being able to engage customers who already find a product in an ad to be interesting is among the most vital goals in the current marketplace.
Being able to make purchases over a mobile commerce platform gives customers the ability to instantly follow through with the inclination that they feel when they are interested in a product that they see in an ad that has been printed in an ad circular, a newspaper, or even in a magazine. Craver pointed out that if consumers need to wait before they act, retailers risk losing a sale.
