Evincii makes OTC decisions easier with PICKKA

NEW YORK While many companies are extending their brands into the social media arena, bringing an interactive brand experience to consumers at home, other companies are working toward extending that brand experience at the actual shelf, through such new mediums as smartphones. Evincii is one of those companies.

While Evincii declined to disclose future roll-outs around the PICKKA platform, this new app may be a glimpse into the future of merchandising, and at the very least the future of point-of-purchase material.

Today, you need clip-strips and adjacencies to entice synergistic, incremental sales. But what of tomorrow? Imagine combining that product recommendation with some of the functionality today found on the sites of online retailers like Amazon.com with a “people also bought …” feature. Or imagine “coupling” recommendations, where if a consumer searches for one item, say sun block for example, the smart phone app recommends another product like vitamin D with a “did you know” entry — “Did you know that sun block, while it protects against skin cancer, also inhibits absorption of vitamin D, an essential vitamin?”

And there are other potentialities. Evincii has already partnered with several retailers to make sure that the product recommendations made by the PICKKA app jives with what that retailer actually has on shelf, thus avoiding a virtual “out-of-stock” experience. What if you could combine that feature with a Google maps functionality, where the product recommendation is paired with an in-store map showing exactly where that product is? That could open the door to whole new world of synergistic adjacencies, where those synergistic products wouldn’t necessarily have to be physically adjacent.

Of course, there may be technological hurdles to these kinds of ideas, who knows? But then again, it wasn’t too long ago that anyone was talking about tapping into a “pharmacist in your pocket” for a product recommendation at the actual location where a consumer makes their purchase decision, either.