Commercial St, Forum go Bluetooth

Commercial St, Forum go Bluetooth
Dhanya Krishnakumar | TNN

Bangalore: Starting today, shopping on Commercial Street will have a new twist. Shoppers, who have Bluetooth enabled on their mobile phones, will receive updates on current sales and discount offers the minute they step onto the street. Shopkeepers in the area in conjunction with TeliBrahma Convergent Solutions are working towards converting the entire street into a Bluetooth Zone.
Says Ajay Motwani of the Commercial Street Association and who runs the DCM store in the area, “We will initially do a trial run of this solution for 15 days with select stores (DCM, Nobel Furnishings, The Favourite Shop). Once we have ironed out problems, we will extend it to 100 of the 200 shops in the area.”
The project will run on TeliBrahma’s BlueGenie solution. Suresh Narasimha, founder of TeliBrahma, says all a shopper needs to do is turn on his Bluetooth application. “We send him rich content in the form of coupons from various stores that have sales going on at that particular moment. We also provide him with a map, to help him spot the store. And the minute he feels he’s had enough, he merely needs to turn it off,” Narasimha says.
Forum Mall in Bangalore’s upmarket Koramangala area ran a pilot using this solution between June and August this year, and since October 1 have moved on to this platform. According to Merveil Varghese, brand manager of Forum Mall, “This helps the 72 shop keepers in the mall directly address their customer. And it works better than static branding, and the person tends to act on the message instantly. It also helps us convert the footfalls in the mall into actual sales propositions.”
“It has been lapped up by shopkeepers,” says Abhishek Chaturvedi, VP of Theme Infracom, who partnered with TeliBrahma on the Forum Mall project. “Even for the pilot run we had close to 14 brands working with us, including Peter England, Archies, Adidas, Pepe Jeans and Sangeetha. We now have close to 20 brands including new ones like Nik Nish and William Penn,” he adds.
During the pilot, the Peter England store in Forum ran a special scheme wherein people who walked into shop with the Bluetooth message got a 10% discount on their purchase. “Close to 40 people availed of this scheme. So we might consider continuing with this medium,” says Kavitha Shah, retail head of RK Group which operates the store.
Adds Harish A, business manager of mobile retailer chain Sangeetha, “We had many people walking into our stores to check out the offers. We in fact intend to use this in our other outlets across the city, like the one on CMH Road.”
The biggest advantage, Motwani says, is that people don’t have to memorise the newspaper ads about particular sales anymore. “They can come to Commercial Street and be directed there real-time. This will also help brand visibility,” he says.