When worlds collide

How many people have such applications and use them? The record holder in my office has several dozen and she uses quite a lot of them. I only have a few, but it was when I was using one of them (Vivino) during our work on the November issue of the magazine, that something of a ruckus occurred in our small team. A wine a colleague had brought back from Greece for our delectation turned out not to be ambrosia of the gods. The application assessed the flavour of the drink (so-so), and so the price it was bought for turned out to be the right one... low. You do not actually have to be a wine connoisseur any more, all you need is a mobile phone with access to the internet. I know it has become something of a cliché to say this, but these two devices have changed our lives. They have also been changing the nature of shopping centres. Malls are now becoming places for meeting up and spending free time (claims Mikael Andersson of Inter IKEA Centre Group in our conversation this month), or places where you can get everything done (Ran Shtarkman of Plaza Centers). Developers are aware that chain stores pose a threat to their position. The internet and mobile phones, if used to attract customers to shopping centres, could be a weapon in this fight. But asking where such customers have done their shopping – on the net or in the real world – is making less and less sense, since the boundary between the two worlds is now breaking down. The time has now come for omni-channel shopping (more information about omni-channel shopping can be found in our ‘Shopping Across the Digital Divide’ article). Consumers are viewing products online but then want to try them out in real life and then make the purchase either on the spot or when they return to the web, where they can the compare prices available on the various portals and choose the best offer. A new phase has certainly begun in the battle over customers.