Retail is a tough business. And it is even tougher for brands who cannot directly reach the consumer to get their product noticed on the shelf.
The extreme example is the retail liquor industry. Stores are densely packed with a slew of similar products, all with excellent eye-catching packaging, and most brands are not recognized. Along with the density of signage, it is overwhelming. The result, consumers go straight to the product they always buy, and then out the door.
Bottleroom 3 was created by Spark Ranch's Jim Vezina and other partners to create a new consumer touch point and personalized recommendations.
The new touch point is created as the consumer enters the store and engages the Bottleroom 3 app. Engaging at this point enables brands and store to directly reach to the consumer and influence their path through the store. Rather than just going straight to getting a merlot for dinner with friends, they could be influenced to also swing by the craft beer section for a new craft IPA.
A critical aspect of the solution is personalized recommendations.
Typically apps will offer a consumer everything they can. The consumer is expected to go through pages and pages of products - so frustrating.
The Bottleroom 3 app personalizes a handful of beer, wine and spirit recommendations to the consumer, each with a discount to entice them to buy
A special twist is the call to action. The consumer can only use the discount during that visit - and may never see the offer again. No chance to think - I'll try that next time (which is typical when a tasting occurs at a store). It's now or never.
To round out the service, Bottleroom 3 also provides the rebate redemption required.
How are recommendations personalized? Initially a complicated algorithm considers known purchases and preferences selected by the user. This is the approach while data is being collected. The long term goal is to use (AI) unsupervised learning to categorize user tastes along with (AI) supervised learning to identify which offers to recommend.