Behind Spyder’s awesome product-driven consumer experience

By engaging the customer with the physical product, it can start in the offline world where, until now, brands have little they could really do.

If you’re a brand looking for a way to deliver more value to your customers, consumer experience is the smart place to innovate. The thing is, if you think about it, the vast majority of a consumer’s experience with products happens offline. It’s where most retail sales still happen and crucially, it’s where customers actually use most of the products they’ve bought. So if you’re going to deliver innovative consumer experiences, the smart move would be to make sure they start offline.

That’s precisely what Spyder, a leading ski and performance lifestyle brand did – using their customers’ mobile devices to give them way more than they’re used to getting.

So here’s what Spyder did. To commemorate the launch of a new collection of jackets for the US Ski team – a long time innovation partner – Spyder embedded an NFC chip (the same technology in your phone that makes things like Apple Pay work) into every jacket. When customers tap the Spyder logo on these jackets with their smartphones or tablets, they get instant access to social media content (Twitter, Instagram and Youtube) about the US ski team – giving them a chance to draw inspiration from some of the finest athletes shaping their beloved sport. But that’s not all. When the customers are out hitting the slopes, they can tap their jacket to get location-based trail maps, weather data and points of interest – incredibly useful content that meaningfully transforms the skiing experience.

In effect, they’ve turned their jackets into living products. Products that actively improve the broader context the customer is in.

Spyder isn’t the first brand to deliver personalized experiences to their customers. And they certainly won’t be the last. But the reason this experience is so innovative is that it’s made for the offline world.

By engaging the customer with the physical product, it can start in the offline world where until now, brands have little they could really do. But because it relies on digital content to actually engage the customer, the interaction is inherently scalable. This is a big shift. Spyder has started to create a unique new platform from which to deliver all sorts of new experiences – their own products.

It’s a brave new world for brands with a laser-focus on delivering more value to their customers. And Spyder’s one of the pioneers pushing its limits.

For more information about our solutions portfolio please join SMARTRAC at EuroShop, Booth 6G31, or visit www.smart-cosmos.com.

SMARTRAC enables retailers and brands to push the customer experience to new levels while managing the merchandize lifecycle end-to-end for maximum efficiency and agility. Leveraging its groundbreaking Internet of Things platform Smart Cosmos and leading RFID products for item digitalization there are no more limits to rapidly implement solutions for business growth and optimization.

Through our global footprint and high-capacity manufacturing facilities we can provide the broad coverage, high availability and scalability global retailers and major brands require. For more information, visit www.smartrac-group.com, or sign up for our customer newsletter.