Blue Diamond

Blue Diamond contacted Red Dot Digital Media through its partner, spinTouch, to find a way to merchandise its products more effectively to customers in-store, while simultaneously educating salespeople at key retail locations.

Location: Multiple • Industry: Retail and Manufacturing • 2023

BACKGROUND
Blue Diamond is a Tennessee-based manufacturer of tractor attachments, and a widely recognized name in the global attachments industry. The company consistently encountered the same problem across its network of retail locations: Blue Diamond found that local retailers lacked the depth of product knowledge about what Blue Diamond manufactures to effectively sell the company’s products. This contributed to lost sales, and in some cases led customers to purchase tractor attachments from Blue Diamond’s competitors.

To address this challenge, Blue Diamond contacted Red Dot Digital Media through its partner, spinTouch, to find a way to merchandise its products more effectively to customers in-store, while simultaneously educating salespeople at key retail locations. Together Red Dot and spinTouch developed a touch-interactive kiosk to present information about Blue Diamond’s portfolio of tractor attachments in an engaging, easy-to-navigate way.

Initial Deployment Date: 07/2023

Equipment:

• BrightSign XT1144
• BrightSign Cellular USB Modem
• CrimsonAV 49” All-in-One kiosk with touchscreen

The kiosks help customers search and filter to find their chosen product, while also enabling them to learn more, watch product videos, scan a QR code to download product spec sheets to their mobile device, and even call the Blue Diamond support line in real time by scanning a QR code on the kiosk’s display. This customer-driven workflow allows them to self-educate and even contact Blue Diamond directly without the need for salesperson intervention.

Red Dot built a robust and intuitive CMS solution that features a custom script that automatically scans the Blue Diamond website to pull appropriately tagged product data directly from the website into the kiosk’s CMS. This workflow automation alone saved Blue Diamond hundreds of hours by eliminating the need to manually enter product data into the kiosks. And while the kiosks automatically pull content from the Blue Diamond website, the user experience is uniquely tailored to the retail environment and gives customers an intuitive path to familiarize themselves with Blue Diamond’s diverse portfolio of tractor attachments.

Additionally, store personnel can easily adjust individual kiosks to display certain products and hide others based on regional availability. For example, stores located in the Midwest can ensure that farming equipment is displayed in their predominantly agricultural region, while attachments such as snow plows are displayed in stores located in regions that experience significant annual snowfall.

“Red Dot was the ideal partner to tame the complexities of this project and deliver an interactive kiosk that gives Blue Diamond the ultimate flexibility in how their retailers attach kiosks to their respective networks,” said Paul Hashemi, founder and CTO of spinTouch. “Thanks to Red Dot’s expertise working within the BrightSign ecosystem, the kiosks can be hardwired into the network, connected wirelessly via WiFi or even connected via cellular using the BrightSign Mobile solution. Offering this trio of network connectivity options gives retailers the utmost flexibility in where they place kiosks, ensuring they fit seamlessly into the layout of the stores, and deliver the most informative value to customers as well as store personnel.”

Red Dot also created a powerful analytics platform that collects data from each kiosk and helps Blue Diamond monitor how frequently customers interact with the kiosks, and which pages attract the most engagement. This helps Blue Diamond understand which products reliably attract the most customers, with the ability to adjust merchandising to maximize each customer interaction.

Each kiosk features a 49-inch touch-interactive display connected to a BrightSign XT1144 media player. While Blue Diamond initially considered using Android devices proposed by another vendor, they ultimately chose the BrightSign media player because it was faster and more responsive to touch and delivered faster page scrolls than the Android-based solution.

Because reliable internet connectivity was a challenge at some locations, Red Dot chose to integrate BrightSign Mobile, which enables cellular internet connectivity and eliminates the need for hardwired Ethernet connections. Additionally, each kiosk was also deployed with Wi-Fi and hardwired options in the event that Blue Diamond needed to rely on alternative sources of internet connectivity.