Controlling My Data Should Be a Fundamental Human Right

Phillip: [00:00:46] Welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast about cutting edge and next generation commerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:01:20] I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:21] I need to unpack a bunch of stuff for you real quick, but right off the top, we want to thank everybody for being part of our survey. Thank you so much for giving us your feedback. We are going to use that to create some awesome content. Really excited about that. So watch our next few weeks on FutureCommerce.fm and you will see some really awesome stuff for about the launch. So pretty excited about that. I want to give a big shout out and thank you to everybody who has made this show possible recently. Most notably, just a quick shout out to our director of content over here at Future Commerce, Lianne Hikind, who has, in her fearless efforts, been putting together a lot of content and helping us develop our social presence and was instrumental in today's episode's content, which is all about Future Stores Miami. And she did a lot of great work there. And so, Brian, let's talk about Future Stores.

Brian: [00:02:23] Yeah. So you were there with Lianne. I'd love to hear. Just well, give me your initial thoughts.

Phillip: [00:02:29] So, yeah, this is actually the first show that we've done in partnership with WB research. Now I've attended WBR events in the past, you know, on the solutions integrative side.

Brian: [00:02:45] Right. Me, too.

Phillip: [00:02:47] Right. So like I've been to, I was at B2B Next. And we've been to the eTail events, but we haven't as Future Commerce not partnered with WBR in the past. And I'll be honest with you, I didn't even know that these events were, you know, that they partnered with members of the press. So it's kind of an awesome strategic partnership. And I know we'll be doing this a lot. So, for instance, I think you're going to an event pretty soon.

Brian: [00:03:14] I'll be at eTail West, and then I'm going to be a Future Stores Seattle. So lots going on with WBR. We are really excited about that. They've got so much great content every year.

Phillip: [00:03:25] For sure. And what I really liked about Future Stores is I have an office in West Palm Beach. And so it was right down, right down the way for me. Easy to get to. But the venue was great. The content was phenomenal. Great brands just, you know, really buzzing with tons of merchants. A lot of retailers, a lot of people in our industry, a lot of thought leaders who are... Usually you have to go to an NRF or a Shoptalk to see this level of speaker. And in fact, if you looked at the Shoptalk agenda for 2019, you'll see a lot of the same speakers from from the Future Stores event there, which is really great. And it's more intimate and you actually get to engage with them. But very, very cool. And I can't wait... I want to tell you about a bunch of the content, because it was just it was super good.

Brian: [00:04:17] Yeah, definitely. In fact, if you do want to go to eTail West, I have a discount code, which is "future." So definitely. Yeah, definitely. Check that out. And I'd love to see you there. So if you can go use the discound code and get going.

Phillip: [00:04:36] That's awesome. OK. So can I just kind of give you a high level?

Brian: [00:04:43] Yeah. Give me the high level. Let's do it.

Phillip: [00:04:44] Let me give you the high level. So let me give you, like the first thing that I think really caught my attention was in one of the opening sessions, there was the brand Stance. Are you familiar with Stance?

Brian: [00:05:00] Vaguely. I've seen their logo around. I haven't really explored them.

Phillip: [00:05:04] As someone who really loves... I'm a huge fan of socks and shoes. Right? So anything that covers feet. You know I hate feet. {laughter} It's sort of a running joke. I really love this brand because, not only do they create really cool, interesting designs for socks, but they have a lot of great licensed brands. So they've really blown up. They've invested tremendously in social, vertically integrated, native sort of online brand... So, you know, really, really, really interesting. So Stance was there, and they were talking very specifically about how they're enabling customers to do self checkout in-store. And so as a digitally native, vertically integrated online brand, their approach to creating a brick and mortar store that clicks to bricks needed to be different. And so there's a lot of people who have self checkout these days. And their approach to self checkout was not to use a kiosk, like you might see at like Lowe's or Home Depot, but to actually allow for customers to use this Stance web site, to use a mobile checkout web site, to check themselves out in the store, and then walk out with the merchandise. So it's one step removed from just walk out shopping. But it's very, very interesting. And the way that they did it was they used a headless e-commerce platform that was layered on top of their KWI point of sale. And you should have seen the room. I mean, people were going bonkers over this. It was really, really cool.

Brian: [00:06:50] Well, it's a super interesting solution to just walk out shopping. I think that there's probably been that e-commerce director at some point that said, "Hey, guys, check this out. You could use this in-store," and somehow it gets shot down. But I love that they just went for it. I think it's really interesting, for sure. Well, how did they handle payments, and then also verification of purchase? Was it the honor system?

Brian: [00:07:22] Yeah. So there's a bit of the honor system. And I think that they were saying that the uplift was enough to warrant sort of the... I don't want to say totally because honestly, I was sort of captivated with their technical presentation and also their brand values. One thing for them was their core brand tenant is, "We exist to celebrate human originality." They want their brand to be, you know, if you like sports, we want you to wear sports on on your feet. If you like art, we want you to wear art. And so you can just express yourself through this. So part of that is, I think, just having people in the store who are engaged with you and helping you with the checkout is part of providing context around the checkout process so that, you know, they can reduce shrinkage or loss. One thing that was differential around payments for them is they said they just decided that Apple Pay and GPay are the way to check out, as well as some others, I believe, PayPal. But on iPhones... Only 21% of iPhone users use Apple Pay frequently, and less than 1%, 0.9% of Android users do GPay. But they made the decision, sort of strategically, that that's where they need to be because that's where payments are heading. And those one touch payments are the future. Yeah. So that was that was really cool. I don't get stuck on that one thing because there's so many. But I thought that was really innovative and very impressive that a brand that I was aware of has decided we're going to eschew a model, an established model, for doing self checkout, and they're forging their own path. And it seems to be successful.

Brian: [00:09:13] One more question on that. Was that their only method of checkout?

Phillip: [00:09:17] No. No. I mean, they still had a cashier, or a mobile cashier. Like people with iPhones that can, you know, check you out in, as well.

Brian: [00:09:28] It would be interesting if they had used their site to be like their cashier checkout, as well. Like if someone wanted to go to a cashier and they actually used this site to be the actual register, if you will.

Phillip: [00:09:42] Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. It might actually be the case. I'm not sure. Yeah. Something interesting follow up on.

Brian: [00:09:49] Yeah, definitely. Because the thing about it is think about the savings as well. Like if you only had to use your e-commerce system as your payments infrastructure even for your stores. I mean that's one less implementation that you have to be involved with. I think that, you know, maybe the future of payments is...it's like the responsive web. Except for its physical and digital. Right?

Phillip: [00:10:15] Right.

Brian: [00:10:16] Stretches to expand to reach both your digital purchasers from home, and your purchasers in your store. You know, it's there's no difference.

Phillip: [00:10:27] Well, there's line busting. So that was something that was a hot topic. As you know, there's a lot of retail brands that have physical stores, including like Warby Parker, and a lot of them, and Swarovski. They were talking about how you how you line bust. Right?

Brian: [00:10:40] Right.

Phillip: [00:10:41] How do you get people out of queuing in a line to check out and get the checkout closer to the people? It's so funny because that's what we do in e-commerce all the time, is effectively trying to put the checkout closer to where the customer is actually shopping. So we're seeing digital impact physical much more in 2019 than I think ever before. Where we used to replicate... I think this is huge. We used to have real world analogs to express a shopping experience online. So we have categories, which are effectively aisles, and we have a checkout where you pay, and we have a shopping cart that you put items into. And those are all like skeuomorphic analogs for things you do in the real world. We're now actually seeing digital analogs become real life in stores. Where you put a one touch checkout, one touch payment checkout button, on your product detail page because the customer is just looking to get in and out quickly. Swarovski is trying to do the same thing, and they want many ways of doing checkout. And in that people don't have to stand in a line. They want people to interact with the product. And if you're in a hurry, that's a customer persona. We're going to change the way that we sell to you and engage with you in the store by having things that are already pre wrapped. Letting you get in and out as quickly as possible, because they understand what their customer needs. And that's entirely influenced by digital. It has nothing to do with the way that they would have done clienteling in the past, you know, in the physical space. And they're segmenting customers in the store in a way that you would probably do online. So we take this idea of personalization and Swarovski says, "We have a persona for a slow customer and a fast customer. And a fast customer has a completely different experience in store than a slow customer." Well we do that online all the time, right? We've been trying to drive personalization and one to one thinking online, thinking that we're doing it the way that they've done in-store. Now, in-store is being affected by the way we do things online. And I think that is super compelling.

Brian: [00:12:50] This gets back to our predictions episode, which is basically, you know, this year is the year that we actually do omni channel. Right? For real. For real. Like there's real adoption. There's real things that affect consumers lives are in a way that they can tangibly see.

Phillip: [00:13:05] Yeah and real clienteling. Really selling to the customer and having a relationship with that customer on their terms, which I thought was really interesting.

Brian: [00:13:17] So Swarovski was there, as well? Was that another session?

Phillip: [00:13:17] Yeah, Swarovski has a great session. One of the, by the way, one of the amazing things, because you were talking a little bit about how Stance was spot checking, authenticating purchases as people were sort of walking out the door. Swarovski actually changed up their whole model because they used to have this sort of Tiffany's model where you had a salesperson who has items in a glass drawer or in the back that they had to, like, go out and fetch. Swarovski decided that they want their customers to actually, like interact directly with merchandise. They have something called a sparkle bar where you can go right up and touch expensive merchandise without having to talk to a salesperson first. And they said that just based on the... First of all, they had to reorient their whole store around having this type of an interaction because they were not built to do that. So they had to re engineer the whole store. And it's not a small thing because when they are rolling out a new store footprint, it takes 7 to 10 years sometimes to get that implemented across the entire organization. So it's not a small thing that they undertake. And they wanted to create like seven points of interaction for all their different customers and they just were not built to do that. And a lot of the questions they had were, "We put this merchandise out for everyone to touch. What about theft?" Right. What about cost in like reformatting our stores to put customers closer to the merchandise? Turns out their challenges are far outweighed by the benefit because they have a longer dwell time in store, in the stores that have this new concept. They have, even though the offset of the cost of loss, a higher rate of loss, actually is offset by other things like a higher price point per purchase. So higher AOV, higher dwell time in store, greater engagement with the customer, and they've also found that it's a cost savings in reducing printed materials. So instead of handing someone a brochure about a piece, or the history of a piece, they actually have digital displays that show them as they're playing with this necklace. And it's just such an interesting thing that the benefits far outweigh the challenges for them. And, you know, they sort of had to take a chance. They had to test it and see if it was going to actually work. And I think we see brands now taking risks, which I think is the benefit of a good economy. And they're taking risks, and they seem to be paying off. And that was a really, really cool session.

Brian: [00:17:50] I can't wait to see stores do what digital has done, which is sort of that CRO discipline. Right? And as they have the ability to collect more data real time and focus on metrics that digital is focused on for forever, they're going to be able to start to make tweaks to that. And I'd like to see how those tweaks affect things. A/B testings per store. We might see a lot more diversity by store as a result because different markets are going to respond to different things. And, you know, this is everything that the people have been doing, or trying to do, online forever. Maybe it's actually easier in store now that we have the technology to implement it.

Phillip: [00:18:35] That actually kind of segues very nicely into one of the technology vendors that I saw at Future Stores Miami. There was a technology vendor who has a product in beta at the moment, so they're not quite ready to go to market, but they have a speaker solution for in-store music and for that actually direct communication. So I can't even believe that this exists in the world. Blows my mind. But they have a... It's called ToutAudio, and they have a speaker array that they can deploy into a store which utilizes face tracking and utilizes sort of positional body awareness and customer path journey in the store to literally target audio only at you.

Brian: [00:19:25] Yeah, we talked about a company that does this exact stuff on a few episodes ago...

Phillip: [00:19:29] A few episodes ago... But I actually experienced it, so they had the speaker array there.

Brian: [00:19:36] That's so cool!

Phillip: [00:19:36] And I'm standing there, and Lianne's standing next to me, and it's talking directly to us, and we both hear different things.

Brian: [00:19:43] Oh my gosh!

Phillip: [00:19:45] Yeah, and there is a dashboard on like an iPad, that I assume like a sales associate could use, that shows you in its field of view, like a graph that shows gender persuasion in store, age range, and figuring out like who we are and how to target messages to us. And I think back to how Adidas was doing this. We talked to Nick Vu on the show, 20, 30 episodes ago. And he was talking about the way that they actually, you know, are intelligently trying to program music in the store that reacts and responds to the people who are in the store and how certain people and certain demographics respond and purchase based on music selection, and that they can control that real time. Well. How about never having to control the whole store experience and having a law of averages? How about one to one music experience? And by the way, this was crazy because they were using Amazon's voice generation service. And it was talking to me. Like it was a computer generated voice that was saying, "If you can hear me in you're a 38 year old male who has brown hair," and I'm like, "Holy crap." {laughter}

Brian: [00:21:13] Yeah. This is the beginning of a Twilight episode.

Phillip: [00:21:17] Yeah, it is. It's black mirror. Right?

Brian: [00:21:20] Yup.

Phillip: [00:21:21] But what's really interesting about it is, I think, in the hands of the right brands who understand how to do this well without being creepy... Technology inherently put in the wrong hands can be creepy. And that's one thing that I've seen actually. There were a couple sessions where I felt like the talking about the deployment of technology could have been considered creepy, but they understand with great power comes great responsibility. So like KFC was sitting on a panel, and they were talking about how they partner with global Wi-Fi deployment partners who put Wi-Fi in their stores and put Wi-Fi in like the top 5,000 retail stores in the world. And they utilize anonymized cell phone data to find out where customers shop that isn't KFC. To figure out the demographic of an in-store customer and where else they like to be, so that they can plan future stores and store build outs where their customers are. And that is so creepy. {laughter} But it's so logical. It's smart use of data to give customers what they want. If a customer was being told, "You're being tracked," so that they can build KFCs, they would probably flip out. But, it's giving them what they want, but trying to do it in a way that enables or assists them. I heard something very similar from Warby Parker. Warby Parker sales associates today, in store, on an iPad, have the ability to see a customer's entire purchase history, and entire browse history, and entire add to shopping cart purchase consideration history. But they never, ever mention it to the customer. They only use it to make suggestions and to softly try to understand the customer better through soft skills. Has nothing to do with, "Oh, I saw you were shopping for X online," because that creep the customer out, right?

Brian: [00:23:17] Right. Yeah. Absolutely. And guess what? Add dwell time to that statistic, as well.

Phillip: [00:23:22] A hundred percent.

Brian: [00:23:23] In-store... digital... They're combining right now. And all of those stats are going to float across both online and physical. So speaking of creepy, you saw that Delta and, I think it was Coke, had to apologize to an airline passenger for an over personalized napkin that they received that felt creepy.

Phillip: [00:23:49] Oh.

Brian: [00:23:49] Yeah, that was pretty interesting. Another...

Phillip: [00:23:52] I saw that recently. That was crazy.

Brian: [00:23:54] Right. And here's another one that, I think, is kind of freaking people out. But just get ready for a lot more of this. Walgreens introduced the smart cold cases. And these are cases that can track your facial expressions and movements and do face scanning, essentially. All the data is an anonymized, of course. But...

Phillip: [00:24:19] Until it's not. But yes. That's not the future we live in, yet.

Brian: [00:24:20] Until it's not. Right. Exactly. That's what everyone's kind of freaking out about. Person of Interest, I don't know if you ever watch that show.

Phillip: [00:24:28] Yes, I remember.

Brian: [00:24:29] Here's a backdoor. You know, if we can hack FaceTime, which is an established technology that's been around forever, what about all of this new technology that we're bringing in... Our smart speakers and this technology that can shoot audio directly to our ears.

Phillip: [00:24:51] Right.

Brian: [00:24:52] There's so much opportunity right now. And the adversary...our hackers... They're out to break it all the time. So security is going to be a continued story for this year and years to come. In fact, I would venture to say it becomes one of the biggest conversations in commerce.

Phillip: [00:25:18] Oh, for sure. And I think it comes back to sort of body data. Something that we don't talk about enough, which is that things that we don't consider to be part of our own personal data points, like our data points for body data  we might usually consider to be like size and fit, our external. But I think actually body data that's most valuable is consciousness, right? Where our gaze is fixed, where our attention is focused, and what world are we living in? So that was one thing that I was really impressed with around the Samsung presentation. Samsung was on a panel at Future Stores, and they were talking about they train their sales associates to understand that there is no longer the world of Samsung only, when you're in a store. There's actually the customer's world and the Samsung world. And when a customer is looking at their phone, and they have two hands on a phone, they are in their customer's world, and they are not to be bothered. And when a customer has their phone in their pocket, and they're looking around, they're in the Samsung world and they engage them in a different way. And I think that, and I believe it was the... Kohls also was on the panel, and they were talking about another brand experimenting with a choice of shopping basket when you walk into the store. When someone picks up a black basket, it means, "I'm in a hurry. Don't bother me." And someone picks up a red basket it means, "I need help. I want to be serviced." And so there's all this understanding in retail now. Again, I think it's the year of clienteling, understanding that the customer is diverse, and they need a different engagement experience from different people at different times.

Brian: [00:27:07] At different time. Yes.

Phillip: [00:27:08] Right. And no one person wants to have the same experience every time they walk in. Sometimes you're in a hurry. Sometimes you're not. And I think that... So things that are body data related that are is things around attention and gaze and focus are, I think, the Brave New World. That is where we are heading and me understanding who has that data and how much of it they have, might actually be the final frontier. Me being able to control who gets to look at what I spend my attention on might be the fundamental human right of the twenty fifties, honestly.

Brian: [00:27:50] Interestingly enough. Benedict Evans, I think two years ago, said you're not going to be able to own your data. There's no chance of that.

Phillip: [00:27:58] Really?

Brian: [00:27:59] Yeah. I think you're gonna be able to maybe... I don't know if I fully agree with him. I think you're going to... Here's what I think. I think that you're going to have to manage your own data. It's gonna get collected. You're going to have the right to be able to tell someone not to use it, but you're going to have to manage that because they're gonna be allowed to collect it. And so you're going to have to own your data in that you're going to need to take ownership of your data.

Phillip: [00:28:27] Right.

Brian: [00:28:27] You need to manage how your data is being used. And that's going to be a skill that you're going to have to be trained on. It's not going to be something that just happens naturally. It's going to have to be something that you as a consumer, as a person... It's a life skill.

Phillip: [00:28:44] Well, if you tried to... And I know that a lot of this sounds really crazy. I want to... I love these episodes, by the way. I'm reading this book right now called Homo Deus, which is by Yuval Noah Harari. And if you have never heard of him, or you've never read the book, or his other books, buckle up. Go check out some of his videos. He's a futurist. Check out his videos. And he talks about... Homo Deus is like the natural evolution from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens. And what comes next? Homo Deus. It's the God of man. And man transitioning to overcoming things like pestilence and hunger and war. And what do we become next? How do we evolve? Who do we become? And some of the fundamental things that I think that he covers in the book is, "What happens to mankind when we can live to be two hundred and fifty years old? What happens to commerce when we live to one hundred and fifty? What happens to us and our understanding?" We can't even begin to imagine what consciousness will be like in a hundred and fifty, two hundred years, because we can't even dream it because even dreaming itself...

Brian: [00:30:14] Man.

Phillip: [00:30:14] Hold on, this is crazy... Because even dreaming itself a dream is an organic chemical reaction in our brains, and we can't even fathom what a cybernetic reaction would be like in a future where we're more integrated with machines. And I mean, that is some crazy, trippy stuff. But I think the point is, is that if you tried to explain three hundred years ago to somebody that at 16 you'll get a license, and you'll be learning to drive this automobile and you'll have to balance a checkbook. And we're going to use our thumb print to pay for stuff on a phone that we carry around in our pocket that communicates with cell phone towers. Our minds could not have absorbed what that meant 300 years ago. And I really believe that that's where we are right now in understanding how we control our own personal data, where we're going to be in 50 to 100 years, because I think it is a fundamental human right to be able to control who knows that sort of stuff about me. So. Big stuff. Mind blowing.

Brian: [00:31:15] Whoo.

Phillip: [00:31:16] I've taken so much away from it. Like honestly, Future Stores might be my favorite conference that I've been to in the last year, maybe longer. And it wasn't necessarily about what was being said because if you were a certain type of a person, and you walked around, and you listened to verbatim what people were saying, you're like, "Oh, that's great. Active learning boasts a 90% knowledge retention rate versus a 21% retention rate for passive self guided learning," which is like a really cool stat. You might not get the subtext there, which is, you know, we're evolving. That's how I read it. That is the future. And so anyway, I can't say enough about this event. I had a really freaking good time. As you can tell.

Brian: [00:32:04] Yeah, man, I can't wait for Future Commerce Seattle. I get to go experience living for 250 years. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:32:10] {laughter} You can tell him hyped up. It was so good, and I would highly encourage anyone to go.

Brian: [00:32:20] When Phillip gets this future, you know that it was good.

Phillip: [00:32:22] Yeah, you know it was good. And definitely check out a Home Deus, if you haven't read the book. It's crazy, but very, very cool stuff. I think other than that, you know, like any show, you get to interact with people from awesome brands, like M&M Mars, or Estee Lauder, or Ann Taylor. And you get to speak to people who actually you're trying to make decisions about the road map of their brand and the retail experiences, and how they see retail as being different. Everybody has a different opinion on things. And being really close to a retailer, being close to the merchant who's making these decisions for their business that impact them, that's where Future Commerce wants to be. That's from us as a media outlet, I feel like that's where we should be is closer to the retailer and understanding what they need, and trying to help them bridge the gap between all the stuff that people are talking about, and how they can actually make use of it.

Brian: [00:33:20] Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of cool technology out there making good use of it as hard right now. I think application of technology... I've talked about this before, but application of all of this technology is what this show is all about. Because there is so much out there, and there's so much coming. So get ready. We're in for a ride. I'm excited about eTail West now. I'm excited about Future Stores Seattle. I'm excited by Shoptalk. We've got a big lineup coming this year. Yeah, I can't wait.

Phillip: [00:33:50] I think we'll do a Shoptalk focused show before we actually get to the event. It's about three and a half weeks away. Really excited about it. We'll be there on the ground in force, and you'll see Future Commerce pretty much everywhere. Really excited about it. And, but this roller coaster ride is over, unfortunately. I think you have a lot of stuff to think about, and we want to hear back from you. So head on over to FutureCommerce.fm. Leave your thoughts and opinions on what you think the future of commerce looks like over on our web site. And you can do that by clicking on the discuss comment box on the episode. Oh, and don't forget, our Instagram is blowing up right now. We have a huge audience that we're building over there. We're doing a lot of exclusive content. So we want you to go check it out. And now we're on social pretty much everywhere @CommerceFuture. And if you know someone from Twitter who can help us get that Future Commerce handle, we'd like that, too.

Brian: [00:34:41] Please!

Phillip: [00:34:42] But like and subscribe at all the places where you happen to get podcasts, you know, we can be in your ears beamed live to you like a speaker array that has facial recognition in a store. OK, without any further ado. Retail tech moves fast...

Brian: [00:35:01] But Future Commerce is moving faster.

Phillip: [00:35:03] I appreciate it. Thanks, Brian.

Brian: [00:35:05] Thanks, Dude.

Phillip: [00:35:06] Peace.