Latest / The Retail Podcast / How to Master Location, Location, Location

Transcript

How to Master Location, Location, Location · The Retail Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello welcome to the retail podcast live at NRF Geolocation
• 0:07
  anything zoo with location has always been a headache for
• 0:10
  retailers. So when I got the opportunity to
• 0:13
  meet with Radar and upcoming and established local, is it
• 0:18
  location? How would you describe the
• 0:20
  dumbest? Describe the company.
• 0:21
  We've been calling ourselves the All in One Location platform so
• 0:24
  they're really easy to add geofencing or maps to your
• 0:27
  application or website. OK.
• 0:28
  So the all-in-one geolocation and company, when I got the
• 0:32
  chance to meet with Nick, the CEO of Radar, I thought would be
• 0:35
  wonderful share with you guys what they do and how they solve
• 0:39
  that problem. So Nick, for those who don't
• 0:41
  know you, if you don't mind giving us a one minute overview
• 0:44
  of who you are, what obviously you're the CEO, Yeah, but
• 0:47
  telling us a little bit about you and then we'll focus in on
• 0:50
  Radar. Yeah, of course.
• 0:51
  So my name is Patrick. I'm the cofounder and CEO of
• 0:53
  Radar. It's fun to be here in New York.
• 0:55
  I've actually been in New York tech scene for over a decade at
• 0:58
  this point, man, my cofounders at Foursquare.
• 1:01
  Foursquare, the early location based social apps and that's
• 1:04
  where we sort of fell in love with location.
• 1:06
  I went to another startup, had to build a bunch of things with
• 1:09
  location tracking and geofencing and it was very challenging and
• 1:13
  we set out to star Radar back in 2016 as the full stack developer
• 1:18
  friendly location platform. We really started as a
• 1:21
  geofencing platform. So we've been long, long been
• 1:23
  the industry leader in geofencing.
• 1:25
  We work with a tonne of retail customers.
• 1:27
  I mean a lot of love is up here, but Dick's Sporting Goods,
• 1:31
  Michaels, T-Mobile, many others and we've since expanded.
• 1:36
  We just lost Radar Maps Platform which is a cost effective
• 1:40
  alternative to Google Maps Platform and Map Box.
• 1:42
  So we can now, you know, truly call ourselves the all in one
• 1:45
  location platform and any location feature you want to add
• 1:48
  to your app website whether it's you know for a retail app or
• 1:52
  website or really anything. So did you find that you look,
• 1:55
  when retailers come to you for you to solve their problem, do
• 1:58
  they know the problem that they want you to solve?
• 2:00
  So like I've got a supply chain problem or or is it they come to
• 2:04
  you and then you sort of say, well actually, sure, did you
• 2:07
  think about this or this? Yeah, you know, I think it
• 2:09
  depends. Some retailers are more
• 2:11
  digitally mature than others and some folks come with have this
• 2:14
  really clear picture of exactly what I want to do.
• 2:17
  Other folks are looking to learn and and and be educated a little
• 2:20
  bit more. So we solve location use cases
• 2:23
  that, you know, varying levels of maturity.
• 2:25
  I would say pretty much every retail opera website has a store
• 2:29
  locator. Yeah, power your store locator.
• 2:31
  That's pretty obvious. So you're looking for, you know,
• 2:33
  accurate maps, reliable service. Yeah.
• 2:36
  You know, I think what a lot of people think about geofencing,
• 2:38
  they might think of it as a sort of background marketing centric
• 2:41
  thing. You know, I'm near a Walmart,
• 2:43
  send me a 20% off coupon, but really there's a lot more than
• 2:48
  that. And you know, we power other
• 2:50
  types of use cases as well. So we power the the store mode
• 2:54
  for Dick's Sporting Goods. I downloaded Exporting goods
• 2:56
  job. You open it and sore radar
• 2:58
  helps. That app detects that the user
• 3:00
  is in store and show them a location based app experience.
• 3:03
  Ohh cool. We do location based arrival
• 3:05
  detection for curbside pickup in store pickup.
• 3:10
  So you know rather than a scheduled order or a customer
• 3:13
  arriving unexpectedly, you can know when they're on the way to
• 3:16
  pick up the order. After 2 minutes out. 10 minutes
• 3:18
  out of 5 minutes out. Really like.
• 3:20
  For Harding delivery or buy online, pick up in store.
• 3:22
  Either role buy, buy online, pick up in store.
• 3:24
  Although we do work with some delivery tracking platforms as
• 3:27
  well and and and power their location tracking.
• 3:30
  So Long story short you know wide range of use cases we can
• 3:33
  solve. Sometimes folks come to us with
• 3:35
  a very clear set of needs or business objectives in mind.
• 3:39
  Sometimes they don't, but in either case, we're we're happy
• 3:41
  to write them. Two final questions.
• 3:44
  Yeah, location jacking. Is that a thing like where one
• 3:48
  retailer would try and grab should location and is that an
• 3:51
  actual thing? Yeah, we've we've, we've heard
• 3:54
  the phrase competitive conquesting, OK use, but you
• 3:58
  know, certainly you can set up geofences around your own
• 4:01
  stores, you can set up geofences around your competitor stores.
• 4:04
  You could imagine potentially running a campaign, but
• 4:07
  honestly, I think even learning, you know, how folks are using
• 4:11
  the app in your own stores, Yeah, you're gonna learn a lot,
• 4:14
  right? And Big Sporting Goods is a good
• 4:16
  example of a customer that didn't have a super clear
• 4:19
  understanding of of how often people were opening the app in
• 4:22
  store. Yeah, they installed Radar and
• 4:24
  they started to realise that 20% of app opens were happening in
• 4:27
  store. Oh wow, that's interesting.
• 4:28
  What are they doing? Maybe they're trying to search
• 4:30
  for an item that's out of stock. Maybe they're, you know, Paris
• 4:33
  and shopping or something like that.
• 4:35
  So whether it's in in your own source or understanding app
• 4:38
  opens in your competitor stores that's that's all very possible.
• 4:41
  I think at the end of the day you want to be mindful of
• 4:44
  customer experience and privacy and and kind of the volume and
• 4:48
  type of data that you're collecting.
• 4:49
  But yeah, that's definitely, definitely a thing.
• 4:51
  Final question. Yeah.
• 4:52
  What did you say the what is the future in in location based how
• 4:56
  do, because there's so many areas in terms of autonomy
• 4:59
  autonomous vehicles, drones. Yeah, I'm curious someone who's
• 5:03
  in the industry. Yeah.
• 5:04
  I mean, you know, I would say that we're still very early.
• 5:06
  One big trend that we're seeing this year is folks looking for
• 5:10
  cost savings with their maps provider.
• 5:12
  So maybe you built your store locator, you use Google Maps
• 5:14
  platform, you haven't touched it in a while.
• 5:16
  Your costs have slowly risen. We're actually now working with
• 5:19
  a lot of customers where we'll help them cut their Google Maps
• 5:22
  bill in half and then unlock some savings which they can use
• 5:25
  to invest in GFS thing. So I mean you know I think we're
• 5:28
  still early. A lot of retail apps, if you
• 5:31
  open the app, it still doesn't really understand if you're in
• 5:33
  store at home, on your couch or in the parking lot, you know to
• 5:37
  to do a curbside pickup. So I would say the vast majority
• 5:41
  of retail apps still have yet to fully realised.
• 5:43
  We're not. Even really there, yeah, with
• 5:45
  the with the normal use cases to to be thinking so further.
• 5:49
  Out I think there's a lot more to do.
• 5:50
  What I will say in terms of new use cases we're excited about,
• 5:54
  you know I I would highlight to one is indoor location.
• 5:59
  So you know not just understanding if somebody's in
• 6:02
  the store, but where in the store are they.
• 6:04
  Maybe you're showing you know scan and pay features near the
• 6:08
  register or you're showing your virtual assistant feature in one
• 6:12
  of the departments. So that's potentially
• 6:13
  interesting. And then you know we think about
• 6:16
  our company mission is connecting the digital and
• 6:18
  physical worlds. I don't know if you saw Apples
• 6:20
  vision grow announcement, they're pretty bulky.
• 6:23
  I think people are going to be using those at home for a while.
• 6:25
  But you could imagine a future where you wear a lightweight
• 6:28
  version of that into the store, and how are you helping people
• 6:31
  find their way to specific items or maybe see kind of relevant
• 6:33
  information about the store and and that's fundamentally A
• 6:37
  geofencing use case. As well, yeah.
• 6:38
  I mean when you look at what Google have done with Live View,
• 6:41
  I think that's that's the wonderful use case where people
• 6:44
  should be able to imagine what the possibility is in store,
• 6:47
  right, in, in terms of doing that.
• 6:49
  And I I guess do you guys help the retailer on full stack with
• 6:53
  delegation? Are you just about the sort of
• 6:55
  the infrastructure for geolocation?
• 6:57
  Yeah. And we oftentimes call ourselves
• 6:59
  location infrastructure. That being said, we solve
• 7:02
  technical challenges at different parts of the stack.
• 7:05
  So we have SDK's, you install your iOS, Android app.
• 7:08
  We have API's you can call from your website or maybe from your
• 7:12
  back end. We really do think of ourselves
• 7:15
  as as a full stack infrastructure provider.
• 7:17
  So all the way kind of down on the client side collecting the
• 7:20
  location data to storing it, helping you do analysis or
• 7:23
  segmentation on it, maybe piping that to other system.
• 7:26
  So SDK's and API's, but we really think of ourselves as
• 7:31
  also platform. Yeah, that's really well.
• 7:33
  If you're ever in the in Europe, drop by.
• 7:37
  Say hi, we have there's there's a great customer we work with
• 7:42
  the big deals app, OK out of Italy and we have a lot of EU
• 7:45
  based customers. So we're we're over there a
• 7:47
  bunch I'll getting sure to say, hey, nice.
• 7:48
  Lovely meeting you. Thank you.
• 7:50
  Thanks so much. Thanks.