Healthy Food Marketing: Is Amazon Go good for brands and shoppers?

Could Amazon Go be the next Facebook or Spotify of the grocery world? Think about the similarities.Facebook and Spotify are obviously great services for consumers but they are great for businesses because of the massive access to data they offer related to customer behavior. That’s exactly what Amazon Go could do for grocery and eventually all of retail. Talk about disrupting a category!

Amazon Go is a grocery store that eliminates checkout lines, so its super convenient for consumers.

Using their patented “Just Walk Out” technology, Amazon tracks what shoppers take (and put back), charging their Amazon account for their purchases. The first location in Seattle will begin serving the public this year, with rumors of more stores to follow.Armed with this technology, Amazon could have three possible revenue streams from Amazon Go: sales from the actual stores, data-sharing agreements, and licensing agreements with other businesses to access and implement the Amazon Go system technology? (similar to the way companies purchase and use Amazon’s digital services arm, Amazon Web Services).

Customers and marketers alike are salivating at this opportunity.

The customer walks in, takes the groceries they want, and leaves. From that simple trip, a marketer could potentially learn: what the customer buys, what items they buy together (informing possible partnerships), what items they put back (honest customer feedback), what produce they deem worthy (identifying customer perceptions), how they navigate the store, how often they visit and how long they stay.These are only a few of the quantitative and qualitative insights marketers could gain from accessing Amazon’s proprietary data. Think about how you could use all of that hyper-targeted data to craft future marketing strategies, inform product decisions, and improve your merchandising. Apply the Amazon Go concept to clothing retailers (or most shops you find in a mall), and the upside is clear: the rare opportunity to simultaneously improve the customer shopping experience while gathering more data about the actual customer.And Amazon isn’t the only chain changing the grocery business. Italian supermarket giant Coop has focused on improving the mindfulness of the shopping experience with their “Supermarket of the Future.”Customers will learn about products as they touch them: data on the food’s allergy sensitivities, production chain, and carbon footprint and other information. And stores will gather the same insights about customer browsing and buying patterns, representing a holy grail of data for marketers.

Thanks to brands like Facebook and Spotify, the concept of improving customer experiences while monetizing marketing services is becoming more and more of a reality for brands.

Amazon Go and the future of grocery shopping are quickly heading down that aisle to introduce these incredible features to the grocery world, and it’s likely that the rest of retail will be quick to follow. Luckily for all marketers, there won’t be a checkout line.