DLF's phygital platform 'Lukout' to help brands optimise marketing spends

Shopping malls in India may soon steal the limelight from digital advertising and e-commerce platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Flipkart, etc., that are used by Indian and global consumer brands to target shoppers.

Taking the 'phygital' platform route, mall owners are expected to make significant investments to not just be relevant, but also stay a step ahead of their digital counterparts by offering real-time insights/data to brands being housed inside their premises. The data generated will thus be utilised by brands/retailers to target customers with attractive and compelling offers for increasing sales.

Pioneering the platform in India is realty major DLF's shopping mall business vertical that also operates the country's largest shopping destination 'DLF Mall of India' in Noida. The company is unveiling its phygital platform 'Lukout' (a mobile application) at the two-day India Retail Forum (IRF) currently going on in Mumbai.

The idea, according to Harshavardhan Chauhan, head - central marketing and phygital, DLF Shopping Malls, is to help brand/retail partners increase sales using big data points that will be made available to them real-time. 

“Say if a shopper steps out of a Zara or an H&M store, the big data will be able to understand and predict/estimate where else s/he is likely to go next based on past patterns. Accordingly, alerts will be sent to brands/outlets that can then interest the shopper with a customised offering (on the Lukout mobile application), thereby increasing the conversion possibilities.

“Another interesting feature of the platform is that brands will be able to know (through heat map data) how many people are inside the store and how many are outside in the immediate vicinity. Based on this real-time data, stores will be able to put together activities to get these customers into the stores and make a purchase,” said Chauhan, adding that brands will be able to view (through back-end dashboards) and tweak their call to action, storefront, looks, offers and so on to appeal/ attract customers based on comparative data insights and boost sales.

The Lukout platform will allow brands to create an offer, decide who they want to reach, at what time of the day, which location of the mall and send it across to the target audience. “The targeted/segmented communication can be sent in the most personalised fashion with precision marketing directly to the consumers in real time. So if Zara had to reach 10 million consumers in Delhi, they would resort to digital marketing through Google, Facebook ads as traditional marketing would not be effective.

"We have circumvented the entire digital piece so brands have own digital platforms and will no longer have to go to any digital publisher. They will have the capability to publish own communication with this platform,” said Chauhan, adding that the entire reach, insights and advertising for brands/retailers have completely been breached with Lukout.

With digital and social media playing a crucial role in the area of marketing and sales, brands have been earmarking significant sums in terms of advertising and promotional (A&P) spends on such platforms. According to a May 2018 report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar IMRB, digital advertising spends is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30% on year to Rs 12,046 crore in 2018.

The best part of the Lukout platform is that DLF Shopping Malls will make it available to the over 3000 brand/retail partners across its shopping malls in North India for free. This will help brands significantly optimise their marketing spends.

“Since we operate on a revenue share basis, helping brand partners increase their business/sales will mean better revenue for the mall owner. Besides, there is no cost to brands for using this platform which basically means they can divert a sizeable portion of their A&P spends towards making attractive/compelling offers to millions of shopping DLF Shopping Malls consumers in the real time,” he said.

With consumers being exposed to high-end technology, information and experiences, mall owners are working towards making physical shopping spaces smarter. In fact, consumers will get more demanding in the coming years and it will be very important for physical spaces to intuitively become smarter to be able to know more about consumers.

“The fundamental difference between an online, e-commerce and an offline player is that the former knows a lot about their consumers. Players like Google, Facebook, etc., know great details about their customers and we have to go beyond that. Our phygital platform allows us to do that and much more. We deployed micro-processors across 16.65 lakh square feet of physical shopping area and built a layer of internet of things (IoT) devices,” said Chauhan, adding that brands/retailers will be equipped to be in sync with their consumer behaviour in real time.

These IoT devices not only help catch/detect a whole lot of patterns of mobile devices over Bluetooth, WiFi, telecom signals, etc., but also facilitate interaction with the shoppers/ consumers. This along with a layer of big data has allowed DLF Shopping Malls to build deep consumer analytics.

“If I have to give an analogy, in terms of knowing our consumers from an accuracy standpoint, wherever a Google or Facebook would end, we would start. For instance, WhatsApp has 20 meters of accuracy. So while these players would know that the consumer is in a shopping mall, they wouldn't know where s/he exactly is. The IoT/big data infrastructure on our platform allows us 0.2 meters of accuracy so we know if s/he is standing in front of a Zara or a H&M or is taking an elevator/esclator moving from one floor to another,” he said.