NRF’s Big Show, the annual trade show for retail technology is being held in New York (January 15-17, 2023), the first time the show is taking place in-person in 2 years. The last time Display Daily covered the show was in 2018. At that time, the crux of the technology showcases was about analytics and customer data. This year, it is about the integration of online and offline shopping experiences.
What does that mean? It’s pretty clear that touchscreen technology has full penetration into point-of-sale (POS). It’s also pretty clear that you would have to be a very resistant person not to have ever shopped online or being do so fairly regularly. So, we have a pretty comfortable audience for point and click in-store and online. We also have a post-pandemic sea change happening in retail with many stores gone, many stores uncertain about their future, and frankly, many more reasons not to go to a mall than to go. Hold those thoughts for now as we look at another phenomenon.
Amazon has a strong presence at NRF 2023, so much as that you can skip the trip and just browse its AWS NRF page. Granted, Amazon isn’t alone in their broad infrastructure vision for retail: SAP, Intel, Microsoft, and Google are there with similar pitches. What makes Amazon interesting is that it has a customer-facing proof-of-concept (POC) business that the others don’t. So, it can tout the its just walk out technology and have retailers salivating at the thought of being one step away from hooking shopping IVs into people and having purchases shoot into the bloodstream directly. Hold that thought with the other thought you are holding.
Back in 2018, AR was getting plenty of show at NRF. The difference now is that it is part and parcel of what may be the theory of a unified shopping theory – that’s where all shopping is conducted as one seamless experience.
The future of all retail is digital #NRF2023 #NRF. pic.twitter.com/3bsVxUrzxd
— Convenience Store News. (@CStoreNews_) January 15, 2023
Now, we can summarize the retail space by bringing all of our thoughts together: you’re mobile, you’re used to picking and choosing purchases based on an experience that requires an exchange of data, and you see navigating the aisle of a supermarket or the racks of a clothing store as neanderthal without some sort of digital guidance, and you are never going to take a plastic card out of a wallet, or germ-ridden cash for that matter, if you can ping your way through a purchase. You are, essentially, the same neck-bent smartphone-adjacent human that is going to be all of us by the year 2035.
So, display lovers everywhere, that is now the golden opportunity because there is not a shop window designer in the world today who can hold the attention of that person. Nope. We are going to need lots and lots of stimulation to get those necks unbent for a few seconds to make a pitch or, we are going to have give them some sort of sci-fi experience, like they are talking to a virtual being.
Here’s what you’ve missed so far but there’s still plenty of time to see Proto @ #NRF in the @WachterInc @Verizon & @DeepBrainAI_EN booths. #nrfbigshow #nrf2023 pic.twitter.com/mUfOqynwTz
— Proto Hologram (@ProtoHologram) January 15, 2023
Who has the pulse of the future shopper? Sneaker stores. But sneaker sellers are early adopters of all that is cool and they will probably save NFTs. The demographic of sneaker shoppers is the digital zeitgeist.
Retail Trends in Digitization
What we see at NRF 2023 is a continuation of what has been there for a number of years: interactive displays (more self-checkout options than ever before); real-time content management of digital signage; integrating display technologies such as VR and AR, and personalization around existing digital signage, to target in-store shopping. Essentially, everything that retailers have learnt about A/B testing, retargeting, personalization, and data-driven messaging in e-commerce stores they can now deploy in brick and mortar stores.
Here is an interesting thought exercise and while we use the US as an example, the math should work out for any retail space:
- The US has about 14.2 billion square feet of retail space
- At a very conservative estimate, we are looking at about 328 billion square feet of display space (doesn’t matter how you chalk it up, signage, display stands, posters etc.). Let’s just chop up that real estate into 100×100 areas with a ceiling of 8 feet, and that gives you four walls, 3,200 square feet of walls, which would be a factor of 3.2 over the real estate but we’ll drop it down to a factor of 2. Sounds more realistic.
- Not all of that space is going to get used for displays. A tenth of our estimation of total available display space would be about 200 square feet for our 100x100x8 reference unit.
- The average cost of a 10 square foot graphic is about $200. That gives us a static image, or display, and to fill out all the available display space in our retail unit, we are looking at $4,000 – you want to change those out every season or regularly and you could be looking at $12,000 a year. In reality, you probably won’t get much change because a small store cannot afford it, and a larger store is subject to the whims of a head office.
- So, for all of our retail space in the US, you could have the equivalent of 62 million 55-inch displays worth of viewing real estate. I’d argue that the upgrade cycle is on a shorter lifecycle than consumer because of the wear and tear of public displays so, that’s a factor that will need to be assessed as well.
In reality, we may not feel like we are anywhere near that, but we are not far off because of the convergence of a few technologies: AI vision processing that is looking at retail shelves and managing inventories which connects to digital displays that adapt to show what is on shelves based on promotions, inventory management and even personalization where customers can be tracked. Then you have e-ink pricing labels and kiosks, POS, self-service screens, and a whole slew of other technologies that are digitizing the retail experience for the shopper. It all adds up to a lot of square feet of panel manufacturing.
What probably needs to happen to create more impetus in the market, so that the technology scales down to small stores as much as it does for flagships, is for display vendors to be creating an end-to-end solution for retailers. Much as they include streaming platforms into smart TVs, display vendors should be integrating digital signage apps into retail displays. Not every retailer can support a cloud-based infrastructure or needs to do deep AI into their customers’ behaviors. Sometimes they just need to have some cool posters or an alternative to neon lights.
There is an awful lot of waste and cost associated with retail displays of any kind – it scales expensive up and down the value chain – and there is no second home for discarded signage. Digital displays are the only way to connect to generations that will grow up knowing nothing but the language of interactivity and digital displays as their interface to information.
Other References
- Microsoft at NRF: the changing landscape of retail
- Samsung Updates Retail Display Technology Including New Kiosk Windows 10 IoT Enterprise Edition
- Google NRF content hub
- Accelerate innovation in retail with AWS at NRF 2023
- SAP exhibits at NRF Big Show 2023
- Discover latest AI advancements with Nvidia at NRF 2023
- ReadySet VR
- Vsblty
