Entering The Phygital Marketing Era – Combining Digital And Physical Marketing
Marketing is changing, evolving at a really fast pace. What was common a few years ago is now seen as something that is way too old and that does not work. We can say that we live in an age that is dominated by digital transformations. The traditional marketing model is obsolete and should not be used anymore. Instead, we have to focus on the development of fully integrated marketing campaigns capable of fully connecting the digital and physical worlds.
In 2015 we saw different studies that highlighted the fact that around 50% of the consumers are much more likely to engage with something that offers a digital experience in the event that there is some type of physical world integration. This basically means that we see consumers that now expect these two worlds to blend, bringing us to the necessity to include phygital marketing campaigns in the promotion of different products and services.
Understanding Phygital
Phygital marketing is basically all about creating a full ecosystem between consumers and brands across digital and physical spaces. You then take advantage of both worlds and the best features offered in order to expand and create something that is attractive. The ecosystems can have different sizes, ranging from global to local. Businesses can use phygital approaches in order to better serve customers, increase revenues and even improve the services/products offered.
Examples To Research
Most marketing managers do not know much about phygital marketing. One of the best possible ways to be sure that you fully understand this is to see what other companies did in the past. The examples that you want to learn more about and research include:
Tesco basically pioneered a South Korea virtual supermarket. Users can now order groceries right from the subway platform thanks to an interaction with special display walls that are shop like and that emulate a shopping experience. This automatically led to an increase of online sales of 135%.
Diageo is an alcoholic beverage company that launched a special campaign for Father’s Day with consumers sending fathers a personalized message. The dads had to scan QR codes on the gifted alcohol bottles. The QR downloads went up to 100,000 and the sales increase for the 2 weeks before the date were of 72%.
- Sport Chek Phygital Experience
Sport Chek is now one of the largest of the Canadian retailers. The phygital approach that they had included touch devices, RFID capabilities and gestures, leading towards a revenue increase of close to 50%.
Phygital marketing is now used by large companies like Apple and Google. Also, wearable technology is going to take full use of digital and real world interactions. Human connections will be stronger and we will be faced with sales increases for the firms that decide to use phygital marketing.
