Published on the 04/06/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Retailing giant Westfield invested in a technology laboratory in the heart of Silicon Valley to get closer to an “ecosystem that doesn’t exist” in Australia…
After just one year’s operation, hopes are high that Westfield Labs, a California based research facility owned and operated by the Westfield retail giant “will transform our business entirely”. Speaking at Cebit last week, John Batistich, director of marketing for Westfield, said that by locating the facility in the heart of the ICT ecosystem it was possible to get an early march on technical advances being driven by the likes of Google and Amazon, the latter of which he said had “led the way in behavioural marketing”.
He was particularly enthusiastic about the application of big data and data analytics which could allow retailers to respond quickly to changing customer expectations. He said he had recently returned from an international trip and had seen how retailers in London and Tokyo were using insights gleaned from social media analysis to shift their in-store displays ensuring that items discussed, or ‘liked’ on Facebook, were placed front and centre of the store to greet shoppers when they visited a bricks and mortar store.
Batistich said that it was Westfield’s expectation that “social will start to change the business…the way we design, recruit, market”. He expected that the advent of “wearable ecosystems” such as technologies now emerging from companies as diverse as Nike and Google were showing the way as to what might be possible in the future.
While Batistich was particularly enthusiastic about the long-term benefits data analytics could confer on the retail sector, a note of caution was sounded by Simon Smith, vice president of virtual office at Servcorp, who said, “I find the amount of information being collected on people is pretty scary”. Smith said that large data collections could have negative impacts.
He offered the example of the high rate of holocaust victims in World War II Holland. This he said was because the Dutch census had collected information regarding citizens’ race and religion which was then accessed and used by the invading Nazis.
“It’s all very well handing over your data but the consequences need to be taken very seriously,” said Smith.
