DevHub Acquires Brickwork Software to Expand Online-to-Offline Marketing Power
What does customer experience really mean in 2021? The concept is changing quickly as consumer tastes evolve and the time spent in mobile apps continues to grow. With its new acquisition of Brickwork Software, announced just this morning, the data experience platform DevHub is looking to expand the opportunities for brand marketers who want to scale consumer-centric experiences. The company is also looking to cement its role as one of the leaders in the local marketing space.
“With the acquisition, I see DevHub solidifying its position as the go-to data experience company and expanding into other experience solutions and building out its strengths — scale and customization — across verticals and both B2B and B2C,” says DevHub CEO and Co-Founder Mark Michael. “We will continue to innovate the types of data and experiences brands and partners need to be able to compete in the rapidly changing post-Covid world.”
Brickwork Software has become known in recent years for developing an online solution that bridges the gap between consumer e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail. The company’s technology is used by brand retailers that want to activate web and mobile browsers to deliver customers into their local stores, including Nike, Chanel, Saks, Bassett Furniture, and J. Crew.
By bringing Brickwork and DevHub together, Michael believes DevHub’s enterprise, mid-market, and upstart brand clients will be able to get even more value from their data, so they can develop more intelligent customer experiences.
“Today, a brand might build one experience and forget it for a year or five,” Michael says. “With DevHub, the latest experience can always be updated at scale to meet the demands of what a customer wants in the moment the customer wants it.”
Brickwork will be operated by DevHub going forward, and the company’s software will become a product in DevHub’s lineup of solutions. DevHub CTO Daniel Rust believes that Brickwork’s software will make DevHub’s current offerings to local marketing brands even stronger by enabling new online-to-store conversion actions, such as appointment booking and event RSVP.
The Evolution of ‘Experience’
Tying Brickwork’s appointments and event management tools into DevHub means the full search to in-store or online experience will be handled in one place, and according to Michael, multi-location brands should be better prepared to bridge the gap between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar experiences.
“‘Experience’ is evolving based on consumer tastes, and mobile, voice, and VR,” Michael says. ”DevHub is built for brand marketers who want the latest innovations in data experience — not a boring website or landing page.”
Currently, DevHub powers more than 170 enterprise, mid-market, and upstart brands, and more than 1.9 million websites and landing pages have been created using the company’s products. With the acquisition of Brickwork, the company anticipates even stronger growth in the local marketing space.
Michael says now is the time for brands to start thinking strategically about where they fit in as more people begin to envision post-pandemic life. With consumers continuing to spend more time online now than before the pandemic, he says multi-location brands are looking at how they can make their online and offline experiences accessible and how they can turn their digital channels into revenue-generating opportunities.
“Even before Covid, we built DevHub to be flexible to the changing internet and consumer,” he says. “We learned years ago that the most important aspect of an ‘experience’ is being able to communicate to the customer immediately.”
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
