The state of shopper marketing: Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific

CONTEXT
The requirement for in-store consumer-facing interactive digital content by Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific was born of a need to provide experiential retail tools to help consumers with their purchase decisions, address limited resources for traditional point of sale (POS) deployment and maintenance, address limited control over information conveyed through sales reps and bring about a win-win situation for HP, its retailers and, most importantly, its consumers.

As a self-help demo application for demo units and touchscreen displays, the interactive point of sale (IPOS) was designed to deliver an enhanced and differentiated HP retail experience to shoppers – by helping to eliminate their scepticism of sales expert advice, and giving them back a sense of control over the purchase.

To achieve this, its agency PMG Asia Pacific first set about designing the best possible user experience on IPOS to help consumers quickly discover, learn about and find the best HP products and for business users to glean valuable insights based on consumer interactions and usage patterns for content gap-filling and optimisation.

Key value propositions:
1. Differentiate HP and drive traffi c to HP stores.
2. Consistent consumer engagement and brand experience.
3. Track consumer interaction and preferences.

SOLUTION
Application design and development IPOS was designed to leverage in-store display infrastructure, draw
customer footfalls, encourage interaction, facilitate product experience and promote preference, leading to increased sales.

1. HP benefits
• Gain insights into consumer shopping experiences and preferences.
• 24/7 virtual sales efficacy – easily scalable at low cost.
• Sales growth from not having to rely solely on poorly paid staff or high-cost promoters.
• Brings key HP points of difference such as Beats Audio to life with real in-store experiences (trying the Beats Audio to enjoy music and videos recommended in the application).
• Qualifies consumer interest so the application can serve the relevant product information.
• Provides accurate and timely information to all shoppers, all of the time, regardless of the store.
• Ability to localise content and update new offers/promotions through centralised content.
• Consistency of branding and message.

2. Partner benefits
• Virtual HP sales person – drives customer preference, conversion and satisfaction by delivering content relevancy and utility.
• Always updated with the latest product promotions, prices and information.
• Captures attention, rewards interaction – increasing the chances of converting more shoppers to buyers.
• Viral loop of satisfied customers sharing enjoyable/relevant shopping experiences with their networks.
• Little maintenance required.

3. Customer benefits
• Removes the frustration of having to find retail staff for assistance, or dealing with someone who doesn’t have the necessary knowledge to assist them.
• Ability to actually “experience” the product the same way they would once they purchased the product.
• Enjoy a tailored retail experience on the application based on their input and preferences, among others.

DELIVERY
PMG prefaced solutions with a usability study, and supplemented the requirements gathering with insights gleaned from servicing the same client across multiple media and touch-points.

HP IPOS was launched in May 2013 with UX, UI, content and functional enhancements, including user-centric aesthetics, work flows and content for better consumer usability; scalable information architecture to accommodate increasing portfolio over time; centralised publishing via an online content management system (CMS) with multilingual authoring capabilities, and multiple levels of access-control; offline CMS to enable product and promotion refresh (down to country, chain and store level) by country managers and retailer partners; dynamic self-help tools for intelligent product search, recommendation and comparison; integrated reporting tools for usage analytics and optimisation; and operating system overrides to ensure IPOS is always running from start-up at the forefront, and auto-resumes even if closed.

Installed and active as soon as the demo PCs, notebooks and tablets are turned on, IPOS fi rst captures attention through the video attractor loop, before showcasing content to introduce the various product offerings, fun media-comprising games, music and photos to user-friendly tools to search, compare and seek product recommendations.

Critical success factors As with most successful collaborations, PMG was fortunate to work with committed stakeholders from the various HP product teams, marketing departments, trade-marketing partners and country offices that shared the same vision for the IPOS application as a powerful
integrated retail platform.

RESPONSE
While HP could not divulge all results in detail, it said the campaign resulted in increased sales and shopper conversion by attracting, engaging and encouraging shoppers to experience HP products and services.