Ikea is becoming increasingly phygital with its store of the future: Spain will lead the group's innovation.

Ikea (Ingka) is increasingly embracing the Phygital concept. This concept will be present in its new worldwide test lab located in Alcorcón, just a few kilometers from Seeketing's headquarters.

 

Although many retailers still don't know what Phygital is and think that where there is something physical and something digital, it's already Phygital. We invite them to review this concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phygital

Understanding Phygital as a mixture of physical and digital actions is a mistake caused by the use of technical terms in common language.

A similar example is ChatGPT. Many people mistakenly talk about ChatGPT or GPT3, GPT4 as artificial intelligence. The concept of ONE artificial intelligence is much deeper, richer, and broader than ChatGPT, which is actually nothing more than a natural language processor based on artificial intelligence techniques, like many tools nowadays (including Seeketing).

These techniques have been used for decades, although in ChatGPT, there are more innovations on how trained it is. If you are still not convinced, ask ChatGPT if it is an artificial intelligence, and you will see what it responds (in the response, it is evident that it processes human language very advanced, even better than humans, but it only processes language and does not have intelligence itself).

Phygital implies knowing that behind physical and digital actions, there is the same entity (person or potential customer). To avoid confusion, we review what is not Phygital (things from the 20th century that are still done in not innovative stores):

• Sending an email with offers to consume in the physical store.
• Placing a tablet, an interactive screen in the store.
• Drawing on the same dashboard the number of steps measured by the door's camera, with the number of unique visitors to the website or e-commerce that day.

In all these situations, there is a DISCONNECTION of the information that the Retailer has about the individual behind physical and digital actions. The retailer does not know if the person reading the email is at home or in line at checkout 3. The customer who uses the screen in the store does not know if they are the same person who regularly buys a certain garment on the web or e-commerce. The steps information from the camera is counting the same person who visits the store weekly four times, but says four customers (which is not true), and there is no relationship with the four unique users that same day.

Certain actions have come closer to the Phygital concept:

• Putting a QR with offers for the customer to scan each time they visit the store.
  Leaving the customer responsible for scanning a QR to find out about the store's offers would be the same as if the customer enters the website, but we know they are in the store. This last action could be Phygital and effective if we let the customer scan once for their consent and automatically communicate with them, sending them a WhatsApp the next time they enter or pass near the store.
• Putting Bluetooth beacons to detect the customer who installs an APP.
  The problem here is not the technology, which is Phygital, it's performance. The percentage of total customers who enter the store and that we can detect will be less than 1%. It's probably not very profitable to dedicate a lot of effort to this.

What is pure Phygital and, of course, must be massive (not only applicable to 1%):

• Automatically knowing that the person who enters the store at that moment was browsing a product on our website or e-commerce platform yesterday.
• Identifying which person who received our email with frozen food promotions this week is currently in the frozen food section of the physical store.
• Recognizing that the same person who passes by the shop window every day but only enters the store on Friday afternoons, and sends them a WhatsApp message when they pass by on a different day than Fridays.

All of this and much more implies having an identifier that links the physical behavior with the digital behavior of each customer as a single entity.

We are always happy to share with you other examples of extensive use of Phygital.