CANDDi- A Platform for Truly Personalised Retail?

What turns ‘big data’ into ‘big impact’? This is a question that has been orbiting my mind for a long time. It has been brought crashing into focus by the work I’ve been doing around the future of retail.

Here’s the example: I am shopping. I pull out my phone to do a price comparison on the item I am considering. Rather than sit passively by while it is undercut by the internet, the shop interjects with a counter-offer to the one I have found online.

I think this will happen. It will mean me signing up with some sort of app from the shop, potentially with some fairly heinous privacy terms. But everything I have seen so far about human behaviour suggests to me we’re fairly carefree with our personal data when there are deals to be had.

After all, when did you last eat at Pizza Express without checking for a voucher?

Now for this to happen there will be a number of players working together. It starts at the user end with the software platform running your personal devices - let’s say Android - that needs to be able to run background processes that are aware of both location and other apps being run.

It relies on an identity broker - maybe Vodafone, or Google - being able to connect my location with my identity. And it relies on richer data about me as a consumer, either a track record of purchases from the store itself, or a broader data set from someone like Experian.

Combine this information with contextual information about my behaviour (what am I looking at/comparing etc) and the shop can start to make some good decisions about whether I’m a prospect worth pursuing and if so, what might make me convert there and then.

The question is, what system pulls the information together, makes the decision and drives the response?

Looking at the cool work the CANDDi team is doing today in the eCommerce space I think CANDDi could well be the interaction platform behind this type of application. A flexible fabric for delivering practical ROI from big data in a retail environment.

It’s certainly something I’ll be speaking to my futurism clients about when they’re considering the future of retail.

This is a guest blog post by Tom Cheesewright, co-founder and now full time futurist at Book of the Future