StONE

StONE: The High Street Online Networked Environment Project aims to attract consumers back to UK High Streets, to increase their time spent, spend rates with local businesses, and the number and frequency of return visits. It will combine the online and physical realms to enable High Street retailers to connect with customers, to hyper-locally promote and market their business in a time-specific targeted way, and to gather business intelligence about their customers and their behaviour. It will bring together a partnership of the local authority, the social media platform, the network provider, and local skills to support the re-emergence and growth of the High Street. The right mix of skills, technology and content is required: technology alone will not meet this challenge.
StONE is a High Street Wi-Fi project that links Wi-Fi access to local High Street retailers. Internet access for consumers is offered in exchange for social media sign-on to provide demographic and contact information. Internet access will begin with a proprietary social media landing page with content from businesses in the immediate area. This will be different for each access point on the High Street. As the consumer moves through the High Street and into different shops they will receive different location-specific content. Marketing tools will enable retailers to provide offers through push notifications. Time-related promotions will encourage consumer spend. Cross-promotion based on immediate location will drive visitors from one retailer to visit others locally. Consumer analytics based on demographics information and activity, such as dwell time, conversion rates, and retailers also visited, will provide an intelligence service to improve the customer offer by retailers.
To-date approaches to High Street Wi-Fi do not support local retailers, do not provide free public Wi-Fi, and do not create value for the local community. StONE will create the platform for a sustainable, scalable model based on value to local retailers and to the local authority. It will create a community of retailers, working together to win customers back for the High Street from online and out-of-town.
Importantly StONE provides a reason and an impetus for SMEs to be online. Many High Street SMEs are not online – in one UK inner city as few as 10% have broadband connections. However, online content for StONE must be created by the business in order for it to be aggregated by the social media platform. Moving SMEs online creates externalities as productivity services such as cloud are adopted and sales channels are opened up.
There will also be a direct jobs impact in the local economy with StONE. Local retail SMEs will not be able to engage with StONE without digital skills and confidence. A support service to help businesses adopt this programme will draw upon the local computing and engineering student base. They would develop the online content and support on premise network deployment. Retailers will be taught how to use the available tools such as marketing campaigns and customer analytics. The support service will also drive adoption and use of the cloud service ecosystem, and help businesses maximise their reach through online sales channels.