Smart Products and Smart Stores
摘要
Products and stores are the brand’s most tangible, owned, and irreplaceable assets. When intelligently transformed, these sovereign assets become engines of user intimacy—extending engagement into everyday life, reducing reliance on external intermediaries, and reinforcing the brand’s strategic autonomy. This chapter covers two topics. First, it explores how products, packaging, and even print ads (Module 5) can evolve into intelligent digital touchpoints that continuously link users to the brand ecosystem. Second, it examines the new role of physical stores (Module 6) in the user journey—how brick-and-mortar locations can be transformed into smart stores that support the entire consumer decision-making process. It highlights how smart products and smart stores, when integrated into the brand’s digital infrastructure, can accumulate users and data, enhance intelligent operations, and unlock new sources of profit in the digital era. It also explores new retail formats. A case study on Walmart is presented as online supplemental material. attached at the end. Core Concepts: Smart products; Smart stores; IoT in retail; Product-service-experience continuum; Retail technology; Showrooms; Experiential retail; In-store analytics; New revenue sources; New retail formats.