eBay is synonymous with online auctions. It created the category, so it’s an understandable perception of the brand that will be difficult to escape.

Recently it has been making a big push to be relevant in the bricks-and-mortar offline retail world through initiatives like the Here point-of-sale system, so the announcement it is partnering with an unnamed retailer to create a “pop-up” shop with a touchscreen window-front is not surprising. Late last week, eBay CEO John Donahoe said that retailers needed to “go to where your consumers are shopping.”

Where do you go to find shoppers? You go to the store, of course!

Human beings have been participating in commerce by going to the market for thousands of years. A couple of decades of technological advancement are not going to eliminate such a deeply ingrained social interaction. Most purchases are made in-store, and that is not changing any time soon.

The technology winners in retail are not going to be those that try to fundamentally change the shopping experience. They are going to be the ones that best enhance the real-world interactions a shopper is already using.

Online grocery shopping has continually failed because it removes the immediate, spontaneous, sensory and social components integral to grocery shopping while delivering little in the way of convenience or selection enhancement. Essentially it has been unable to find a model that fits into how people shop. Grocery retailers have had much more success with technologies like self-checkout and in-store mobile applications, which add value to the existing customer experience.

Shoppers are less likely to look at the retail experience in terms of online versus offline. To them, purchasing is about satisfying a need, and they will use the tools that best help them find the product that does so. The winning technologies will be those that enhance the retail experience by delivering one or more of six key enhancement opportunities:

• Extending Product Selection 
• Recommending Products 
• Comparing Products and Prices 
• Extending Purchase Opportunities 
• Simplifying or Enhancing Payment 
• Enhancing Post-Purchase Care

The success of online retail is largely because of its ability to deliver against these opportunities, and the logical extension is to bring the online tools to the physical store. eBay is setting itself up for success, keeping its focus within these opportunity areas, and it has “bet hard on mobile” to make it happen.

Donahoe said, “It’s not just to shop or make payments, but the whole flow.” Donahoe suggested a shopping experience that has the shopper using not only their mobile phone, but many digital touchpoints at different points in the experience.

Shoppers are already using the web pre-store to research product selections and are using their smartphones to compare price and product while in-store. A Deloitte study of consumers who used apps/websites in-store during their most recent shopping trip showed that 85 percent of shoppers surveyed actually made a purchase that day, compared to only 64 percent who used a third-party app or site.

The large touchscreen window-front may create the most buzz because of its novelty and flashy nature. It may very well be successful because it can be used to extend the product selection and provide purchase opportunities at times beyond the store hours. But the real hero will be the mobile device.

Shoppers are comfortable with their smartphones. They feel safe and in control with them. Most importantly they have already integrated them into their shopping experience. The more ways eBay can find to enable mobile devices to hit on the enhancement opportunities, the more successful it will be.

Beyond online auctions, eBay has been an innovator in the way people buy, sell and pay for products online. With the “pop-up” store it will have a showpiece that blurs the lines between the online and offline, creating a true unified shopping experience. It has the opportunity to break the perception of the brand as an online auction site and become known as a true retail innovator.

Frank Vrtar is Senior Designer, User Experience for Interbrand Design Forum.

Mobile, big data, content and disruption, the usual suspects, were all marched across the stage at the 2013 Ad Age Digital Conference. One theme, close to all our hearts, truly dominated: the humans that give every brand their reason for being.

Whether the motives behind it are altruistic, dollar-driven or both, the result does seem to be better experiences for people. From insights to new levels of convenience to heart-wrenching, real-life adverstories, at this year’s Ad Age Digital Conference, humanity was the bee in every business’ bonnet.

Some were using it to greater effect or on a more meaningful level than others. Google, for example, walked the walk, eschewing any talk of "digital marketing," opting instead to talk about storytelling. They didn’t just talk about it, but presented it in a way that embodied the ideas they were touting, wowing a late-afternoon crowd with a spine-tingling, genuinely engaging and human-pleasing experience.

Before we get too gooey, congratulating our Adland peers on being human after all, let’s not forget what this is all in aid of: sales, naturally. In these digitally enabled times it does appear, though, that the efforts of businesses to appeal to our human needs and desires is actually resulting in a better time for people.

Digital video and original content is a great example. People like watching TV, movies and videos. If we’re to believe the speakers at Ad Age, people just like watching in general. People also like and need to watch on their own schedule, and they don’t want to pay too much or for things they don’t watch.

Starting from these basic human insights and then applying technology to the problem has brought new companies and business models into being: companies like Netflix, Hulu, Redbox and, more recently, Aereo. Aereo, using tiny digital TV antennas, allows consumers to view live broadcast television in HD on any internet-connected screen. Rejecting the traditional bundled options existing cable companies offer, CEO Chet Kanojia said the idea was to create a digital "cable" option from the consumer perspective, "to connect the dots for consumers so they can access the TV they want."

It’s an idea that has caused more than a little controversy among the TV establishment, but has ultimately resulted in more options and better access for the TV-viewing public. Hulu takes a similarly disruptive view, using their digital capabilities to free them from the usual constraints of scheduling and ratings, and allowing them to focus on finding and creating quality content tailored to their wide range of viewers. Again, it’s a new approach to raking in the bucks for business, that absolutely pays off for the viewer.

As ideas go, putting people at the center of any brand endeavor, digital or not, may seem more common sense than mind-blowing. But with brands and businesses properly putting their weight behind the effort, it appears we humans can only win.

Claire Falloon is a Senior Consultant in Verbal Identity for Interbrand.

Confession time. I used to own a BlackBerry. Three in fact. And I loved them. It feels good to say it, so I’ll say it again. I LOVED MY BLACKBERRY. You won’t hear it much because it isn’t cool to even think that any more. It’s like listing an AOL account on your resume or mispronouncing Hyundai. You should just know better. Today execs all over America text their families on their personal iPhones over lunch while putting their company mandated BlackBerries in their waist holsters. BlackBerries have become the corporate technology captor but none of their users are developing Stockholm syndrome anymore.

There have been some big pieces of news around BlackBerry and RIM recently – the “RIM = RIP” headlines have been writing themselves for a while now and so it was proven as the kooky Canadians who felt the need to put a holding company between their marquee BlackBerry brand and the customer did what we all hoped and just let it fade away. They wouldn’t be the first holding company in history whose sole job was to obfuscate, but most of those are headquartered in the Caymans and get investigated in Tom Cruise movies. So all you lucky RIM stock owners who have lost north of 60% of your portfolio value can check out the new BBRY ticker and pin your hopes and dreams on the fact that the same team that brought you RIM might, maybe, maybe have a plan.

And they might.

Their plan looks like being one that leads with the brand and acknowledges the customer for once. They plan to make you fall in love with their phones again. By committing to BlackBerry they are sending a message. No more distractions, no more shenanigans, no more hiding behind a meaningless acronym – let’s get back to making some of the most business friendly hardware around. The new BlackBerry Z10 is getting rave reviews for putting the user at its core (ahem) and providing an extremely productivity friendly tool to get things done. That sounds a lot more like the BlackBerry I fell in love with.

What’s more remarkable is that this single mindedness is happening at a time when distraction is so easy to come by. Those at CES and readers of tech journos will appreciate the overuse of the words “innovation,” “ecosystem” and “connected” recently and that is only going to continue. Everyone from Huawei to Polaroid to the networks to Google are trying to own the customer’s connected digital life and the noise there is deafening. It is therefore actually quite refreshing to see the newly minted BlackBerry company understand the need to retrench, rebuild credibility through their products and help us fall in love with the BlackBerry brand again via their new devices.

There’s room for artists who make just one beautiful thing. Maybe BlackBerry, by getting back to what made them famous in the first place, can earn a place in our hearts again.

Hugh Tallents is a Senior Director of Strategy at Interbrand New York.

If Facebook is a key channel in your strategy, then think about this: recent data suggests that Facebook fans are “hiding posts at an alarming rate.” In the race to count more fans, or followers, brands may not be connecting with them in a meaningful way.  Rather than fans un-liking, un-fanning or even commenting, they simply choose to make your brand invisible.

A recent article from Fast Company by Ekaterina Walter, Intel's social media strategist, highlights that one of the ways people “negatively” respond to Facebook pages is to simply hide all posts. Working with PageLever, a Facebook analytics tool. Walter discovered:

“Facebook fans are most likely to block ALL your page stories when they take a negative feedback action, 60 times more likely than unfanning your page. Which means that just because your brand has a lot of fans doesn’t mean all those fans are seeing the page content. Some fans may have just hidden the page. Fans are more likely to report a post as spam than to unlike the page.”

What most caught our eye, was one of Walter’s recommendations for avoiding invisibility: Brand Voice. We could not agree more.

“Tweak your copy so it’s recognizably your brand voice. Sometimes the problem isn’t that the content is off-topic, but that it’s off-voice. Your brand has a unique voice, which your fans know and appreciate, so make sure your posts are phrased in a way your customers expect.”

Brand Voice is so much more than how you say it. It’s being true to who you are, the personality your fans have come to know and love. It’s making sure that everything you say lives up to it – the type of content you curate and the spin you put on it when you share. It’s how you sound, how naturally it comes and how unmistakably yours the words seem.

It’s getting all that personality across in limited real estate, in a smattering of words. Hard to do? Sure. Have to do? Absolutely. That extra attention to detail is what adds up to extraordinary experiences. Without it, you're just another – possibly invisible – voice in the noise.

Paola Norambuena is Executive Director of Verbal Identity, North America.

For more on digital strategy and branding in this new ecosystem, please see Simon Smith and Erica Velis' piece Playing to Win on the Digital Frontier.

The upcoming issue of Interbrand IQ is focused on digital and will feature brands and brand leaders that are helping traditional businesses transcend the idea that they need a separate digital strategy – and demonstrates how to incorporate digital into every aspect of business and brand strategy.

We sat down recently with Adam Brotman, Chief Digital Officer at Starbucks, and learned how the coffee giant is ensuring that the Starbucks’ experience lives well beyond the coffee house. Our interview could not have been better timed as Adam was just named #3 on Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012, joining a group of business innovators who dare to think differently.