Everything Is Retail, one of our 10 Trends for 2013, spotlights how shopping is shifting from an activity that takes place in physical stores or online to a value exchange that can play out in multiple new ways. Thanks largely to mobile technology, all kinds of media—from train stations to magazine pages—are becoming viable retail channels. For the 2012 holiday season, for instance, Mattel and Walmart Canada turned a wall in Toronto’s underground walkway into a pop-up toy store, featuring 3D images with QR codes.
Consumers are largely amenable to buying goods through novel channels, with men and tech-savvy Millennials the most open to it, as we found in a November survey of 1,016 British and American adults that we conducted using SONAR™, JWT’s proprietary online tool. Shoppers are most comfortable with the idea of purchasing via touch-screen displays in public places like train stations. Around 4 in 10 consumers say that if it were easy and secure, they would shop by scanning QR codes on billboards and the like with their smartphones, engage with shoppable videos or magazines, and embrace “TV commerce.”