At CeBIT last week, intelligent spaces vendor Purple and Huawei jointly announced a new marketing solution designed to bridge the online-to-offline (O2O) gap by bringing Google Analytics-like insights to physical venues and retail outlets.
The solution sees Purple integrate its business applications with Huawei's CloudCampus infrastructure, the latter being a Wi-Fi and IoT network architecture with a cloud-based management platform.
According to Purple, its solution delivers rich Wi-Fi analytics to help businesses to better understand their customers and how they interact with a menu to build detailed customer profiles. This can then be leveraged to develop better customer loyalty and reap more revenue to maximize business value.
Importantly, businesses can then take meaningful action based on the data collected. Purple says this can be achieved through social engagement, location and presence analytics, and a broad range of connectable data sources for an accurate, customer-centric solution.
“We are honored to ink a global partnership with Huawei. Huawei is committed to building a fully connected, intelligent world,” said Eric Law, the global chief revenue officer at Purple. “Purple is willing to work with Huawei to unleash the full potential of Wi-Fi networks. Doing so will be creating ever-lasting value for customers and enabling more enterprise users to [proactively] embrace new opportunities.”
Making it work
“50 million people are connected and logged on with their personal credentials to Wi-Fi. This is a technology when integrated will allow Huawei to offer a business-centric solution, and directly integrate their technology with a business process,” said Law, who was on stage at the joint announcement.
Law also offered examples how marketers can leverage the technology for retail shops or venues: “[Three quarters] of the people who walk into your store never come back; if you apply and offer Wi-Fi, it increases the return rate by 9% and a 24% increase with digital engagement.”
“By knowing who is in your venue, and by knowing what they do in your venue, you can start to marketing to them in a very precise way. Think about the bottom-line to retailers and hotels,” he said.
The firm’s technology was also successfully deployed at a sports stadium and amusement parks. “They use our solution to provide an e-shop to those fans to upsell them a premium experience, such as visiting the locker room in the stadium,” said Law.
“At one of top three amusement parks in the world, if someone stays in a queue for more than 45 minutes – based on their location, additional offers can be sent to them. [Such implementations] can give retailers a competitive advantage back in their physical spaces.”
First published in CMO Innovation