Recommended Use Case: 4 Ways The Blockchain Can Revolutionize Retail Marketing (forbes.com)
With the rise of cryptocurrency and the underlying blockchain technology that fuels decentralization, several industries have been quick to look at how the technology can benefit their sector. As a retail marketer, I’m interested in how the blockchain is going to inform our purchase path.


More than a “now accepting Bitcoin” sign in the window of our favorite retailers, the blockchain stands to make a sizable impact on the industry.And while the landscape is swiftly evolving, we can make some predictions about retail in a blockchain future. Here are some trends to look out for:


The Future Of Online To Offline Marketing



The notion that physical retailers are at a deficit when it comes to data is one that we, as retail marketers, have been contending with for years. It’s the reason “omnichannel” is a buzzword - brick and mortar retailers have long-known that they need to engage their potential customers where the customers are, which is more convoluted with every new channel that we add into increasingly digitized lives.


For the past few years, physical retailers have implemented technological solutions such as beacons to try to bridge the gap - the blockchain can take these solutions to the next level.


“Beacons allow retailers to know who a customer is and use internal data for some peripheral customer insights,” says Abhi Pitti, CEO of 
Nucleus Vision, a company that uses the blockchain in combination with Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology to create real-time customer intelligence for brick-and-mortar stores.


“Because of the lack of customer data, the information gleaned using beacons, alone, still doesn’t measure up to customer insights captured online.


But when we merge in blockchain technology, all private databases such as banks, third party apps on a mobile device, and credit card companies can open customer databases to share and monetize data with required customer authorizations recorded on a secured, incorruptible, transparent, chronological, append-only, distributed ledger called the blockchain.


To put it simply, by combining the use of in-store sensors with a decentralized authority, retailers can glean unprecedented amounts of information about their in-store customers in real-time.


continue to page 2 and 3 here on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tinamulqueen/2017/12/22/4-ways-the-blockchain-can-revolutionize-retail-...