By Aimee Chanthadavong

The competition is no longer two doors down; instead it grown to a global scale. This forces retailers to work harder to zero in on how they will outdo their competitors, including looking at how they plan to execute their global and national campaign strategies.

Australian-based digital agency tkm9 has teamed up with Vodafone and NetComm to develop a trademarked interactive digital signage. It’s a platform that allows retailers to interact with customers on a global scale through augmented reality, gesture, mobile and social connections.

The system, which works off a global sim, can deploy and push a single digital signage message anywhere in the world.

Mark Hodgens, tkm9 global CEO, told RetailBiz while there are existing technologies that offer parts of what the system can do, the interactive digital signage creates a shopping experience that bridges the gap between bricks and mortar and online as an entire system.

“When a store is shut it can stay open,” he said.

“We’ve worked out everyone trusts their mobile phone and what we have allowed people to do is experience a virtual store through augmented reality on their phone. So it means even if a store is shut your customers can still shop with you. This mixes bricks and mortar with digital in retail.”

tkm9’s current global network of existing customers that have adopted this technology includes Woolworths, Zara, AMP Capital, Coles and Dan Murphy’s.

As part of the technology, retailers are able to use a heat maps to track a customer’s movement in a store, while also picking up information like whether they’re female or male, what colour clothes they’re wearing and their age.

According to Hodgens, customer data is a crucial element to helping retailers customise the message they’re delivering through digital signage.

“The system comes with all the analytics retailers need so they can service their digital content to specific customers,” he said.

“We found when people select to wear certain colours they do so because they like that colour and if we can reciprocate that in our client’s message then usually the customer would react better to it.”

To view the technology in action, click here.