Enabling brands to know who bought their products, what products they bought, where and when.

The problem 

Samsung needs a way to know who bought their products. Samsung business model in the U.S. relies mostly on retail channel partners, so it doesn't know who bought what product. Any other brand doing business in this way has the same problem.

The solution 

Samsung is having a grand IoT initiative whereby every smart product will be on-boarded into your Samsung account automatically. That is you have that Samsung app on your Samsung phone. However, in terms of sheer units, Samsung sells a lot of products that are not smart, and it sells smart products to customers who doesn’t a have Samsung phone. For these cases, I conceived a solution called “Smart Packages”. The design comprised of embedding a beacon inside of each package and that beacon is activated upon certain mechanical operation such as opening the box or removing the product from the box. The beacon transmits the serial number (if any) and SKU. With that, mobile phones with compatible apps outside of the Samsung ecosystem such as Google Nearby can pick up the signal. Pending certain business rules (e.g. time next to the box, geo-tracking a move from a known store to an outside location) the solution logs the event and customer info. From there the solution can trigger multiple actions such as upsell, cross sell and supplement the CRM database for further work.