Three retailers extending their value with tech partnerships

A collaboration between a retailer and a technology platform can produce substantial benefits for both.

For this week’s column, I’m taking a dive into three recent partnerships where a retailer and a tech-oriented company integrated their capabilities to create new functionality.

These joint efforts go beyond a simple solution implementation, and instead genuinely combine technology and process to enable entirely new business processes, customer touchpoints, and/or strategic insight.

Let’s take a closer look at collaborative initiatives from Lowe’s and Electronic Arts, Yum! Brands and Nvidia, and Neiman Marcus and Scentbird.  

Lowe’s – Electronics Arts

Lowe’s is collaborating with EA Sports, a subsidiary of digital interactive entertainment company Electronic Arts Inc. to be featured in multiple EA Sports digital game titles for the first time.

This collaboration will position the retailer and its MyLowe's Rewards loyalty platform uniquely in each game with branding across multiple gameplay experiences. In "EA Sports College Football 26," Lowe's will be featured on the broadcast overlay of the Stadium Pulse placement, which dynamically showcases and builds crowd excitement as gameplay improves.

In addition, "EA Sports FC" and "Madden NFL" will enable players to engage in a competition for a future title for each franchise through team challenges that offer rewards.

As a result, Lowe’s gains a presence in the burgeoning digital game customer engagement channel, while Electronics Arts provides Lowe’s shoppers with extra reasons to play its game titles.

Yum! Brands – Nvidia

Yum! Brands, the parent company of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, is partnering with Nvidia to accelerate the development of innovative AI technologies. The companies are developing solutions to support and scale Yum’s existing proprietary cloud-based Byte By Yum! platform across its Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC and Habit Burger banners.

[READ MORE: Yum! Brands continues to enhance customers’ digital experiences]

The AI solutions will focus on enhancing operational performance in three key areas: 

• Voice automated order-taking AI agents based on Nvidia technology will equip drive-thru and call center operations with conversational AI.
• Yum! will deploy Nvidia-based computer vision technology to optimize drive-thru efficiency and back-of-house labor management through real-time analytics and alerts.
• The quick-service conglomerate will utilize AI-driven analytics and agents to assess restaurant performance and generate personalized action plans based on best practices from top-performing locations.

This partnership will enable Yum! Brands to widen its efforts to build its own AI technologies that enable easy experiences for customers, easy operations for restaurant teams and easy insights to drive outsized growth.

As a result, Yum! Brands will potentially be able to position itself as a tech giant as well as a retailer, with Nvidia establishing itself as a foundational technology in this effort. 

Neiman Marcus - Scentbird

Neiman Marcus is offering a curated selection of fragrances to members of a flexible subscription program. The luxury retailer is collaborating with fragrance subscription service Scentbird to launch "Neiman's Select," a collection of 30 curated name-brand fragrances.

With this new partnership, Scentbird subscribers will have access to this Neiman Marcus fragrance assortment as part of Scentbird's flexible subscription model. The scents will be available in an 8 ml travel size exclusively through Neiman's Select on Scentbird.com.     

This partnership supports Neiman Marcus Group's luxury growth strategy to offer expertly curated product assortment for customers while letting Scentbird expand its high-end inventory without taking on additional overhead.