As I mentioned a few months ago, the problem of building interesting Retail Solutions isn't going away, in fact, if this article from Advertising Age is to be believed, it's becoming a serious issue for all marketing departments.

This is great news from our perspective as more and more potential clients realize that mobile isn't just about getting content out on the device, but figuring out what you do with it when it gets there. We've been putting a lot of thought into this over the last few months and we're close to releasing a Case Study on our findings, where we'll consider how any modern retail strategy needs to have a Tripod of supporting online services.

The three legs of the tripod are:

Conventional Web
Social Networking Tracking
Mobile Delivery

The issue isn't having all 3 of these, I think that most retailers now have that, or are aiming to. But how you connect them. Users with web access want what they look at to seamless sync with their phones, you want users to interact with Social Networks from your web and mobile properties and be able to easily track what they're doing and you want your apps to maximize your penetration into geographies and markets, and, ideally have a location component.

At the moment, only Viafo have a simple solution for this, in my next post I'll aim to talk about that more too.