Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Mos Place Trust in Other Consumers
Just read an article on eMarketer about the information gathering and trust habits of moms online. Here's the abstract: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007509
What jumped out at me wasn't the raw data in the article. Essentially, 93% of the moms surveyed trust other consumers more than manufacturer descriptions. How sad is that? And where does the ultimate responsibility for that lie? Most of those descriptions are presented on ecommerce sites. Doesn't that make the ultimate responsibility the ecommerce retailer's? Sure, the information comes from the manufacturer, and there really is no way for a retailer to be a sufficiently informed expert to validate all product claims in description form. Still....why isn't this worth the time and effort by retailers to manage, police, and monitor?
The next set of numbers had to do with what influenced a purchase....these were online moms doing product research. The number one most influential medium: in-store display! Which only shows that moms that shop in-store start and do research online. Another huge number was that for Consumer Information Site or magazine....44% were influenced by this. A wonderful source of objective information designed to aid consumers in making more informed purchase decisions.....
Sadly, for the retailer, these sites are product and brand agnostic.....and are doing everything possible to enable the consumer to have enough information so that price becomes the dominant decision on where to shop.
As noted earlier, retail-centric video programming created to empower consumers to make better shopping decisions and presented ON THE RETAILER'S WEBSITE fulfill most of the purpose of these 3rd party information sites.....AND they support the retail brand, can be made instantly shop-able, and support the retailer's assortment.
What jumped out at me wasn't the raw data in the article. Essentially, 93% of the moms surveyed trust other consumers more than manufacturer descriptions. How sad is that? And where does the ultimate responsibility for that lie? Most of those descriptions are presented on ecommerce sites. Doesn't that make the ultimate responsibility the ecommerce retailer's? Sure, the information comes from the manufacturer, and there really is no way for a retailer to be a sufficiently informed expert to validate all product claims in description form. Still....why isn't this worth the time and effort by retailers to manage, police, and monitor?
The next set of numbers had to do with what influenced a purchase....these were online moms doing product research. The number one most influential medium: in-store display! Which only shows that moms that shop in-store start and do research online. Another huge number was that for Consumer Information Site or magazine....44% were influenced by this. A wonderful source of objective information designed to aid consumers in making more informed purchase decisions.....
Sadly, for the retailer, these sites are product and brand agnostic.....and are doing everything possible to enable the consumer to have enough information so that price becomes the dominant decision on where to shop.
As noted earlier, retail-centric video programming created to empower consumers to make better shopping decisions and presented ON THE RETAILER'S WEBSITE fulfill most of the purpose of these 3rd party information sites.....AND they support the retail brand, can be made instantly shop-able, and support the retailer's assortment.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Retail-Centric Programming - The Voice of Retail
Last week I raised the question of whether retailers have a valid "voice" with the consumer and what that might be. Of course, a valid "voice" is simply an appropriate brand positioning and aligned brand message. Today I'm thinking about how retailers can communicate that "voice".
Clearly there is no one single way to do it, and many are already well established. First and foremost, the execution of the customer facing store experience, from the training of the sales staff to the layout of the floor, and encompassing the pricing, merchandise mix and visual presentation are by FAR the most important. Also, the weekly circulars, television, radio and online advertising....all the elements of the traditional (now!) marketing mix are part of that. Corporate efforts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs also contribute and count. Each of these, to some degree, are relatively well understood and utilized. If the medium does not consistently support a coherent "voice", well, that's probably an executional issue, not a lack of understanding.
However, the concept of creating retail-centric appropriate video programming delivered via the ecommerce site may not be so well understood, or strategically embraced. And the tragic aspect of this possible lack of understanding is that no other single strand in the marketing web has as much potential or strength in delivering that "voice" than retail-centric programming delivered via the ecommerce site. Here are the reasons, briefly.
1. The website attacts millions of unique visitors, all of whom are self targeted, opt-in consumers already in some stage of a buying cycle. No other medium delivers this quality of audience. Not even close.
2. Online content consumption habits have changed, and almost all demographics show rising use of online video for entertainment, information, and engagement. People like watching videos online, and they do it often. From home, work, and on their smartphones.
3. Consumers have demonstrated a consistent and sustained shift toward empowering themselves in order to stretch their dollar and get higher satisfaction from their purchases. Lacking that direction and empowerment from retailers, they seek 3rd party sites. The unique visitor growth and time-on-site for these sources is worthy of admiration.
4. Technology has advanced to the allow non-intrusive methods of displaying and making video programming accessible. All the arguments about interfering with navigation, impacting site abandonment.....no longer need to be valid.
5. The cost of producing high quality video programming has plummeted. While it's not free, it's well within the realm of the affordable.....particularly when evaluated on a cross-channel ROI basis.
6. Consumers start their research in large numbers ON the retail websites. They just don't complete it there.
Clearly there is no one single way to do it, and many are already well established. First and foremost, the execution of the customer facing store experience, from the training of the sales staff to the layout of the floor, and encompassing the pricing, merchandise mix and visual presentation are by FAR the most important. Also, the weekly circulars, television, radio and online advertising....all the elements of the traditional (now!) marketing mix are part of that. Corporate efforts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs also contribute and count. Each of these, to some degree, are relatively well understood and utilized. If the medium does not consistently support a coherent "voice", well, that's probably an executional issue, not a lack of understanding.
However, the concept of creating retail-centric appropriate video programming delivered via the ecommerce site may not be so well understood, or strategically embraced. And the tragic aspect of this possible lack of understanding is that no other single strand in the marketing web has as much potential or strength in delivering that "voice" than retail-centric programming delivered via the ecommerce site. Here are the reasons, briefly.
1. The website attacts millions of unique visitors, all of whom are self targeted, opt-in consumers already in some stage of a buying cycle. No other medium delivers this quality of audience. Not even close.
2. Online content consumption habits have changed, and almost all demographics show rising use of online video for entertainment, information, and engagement. People like watching videos online, and they do it often. From home, work, and on their smartphones.
3. Consumers have demonstrated a consistent and sustained shift toward empowering themselves in order to stretch their dollar and get higher satisfaction from their purchases. Lacking that direction and empowerment from retailers, they seek 3rd party sites. The unique visitor growth and time-on-site for these sources is worthy of admiration.
4. Technology has advanced to the allow non-intrusive methods of displaying and making video programming accessible. All the arguments about interfering with navigation, impacting site abandonment.....no longer need to be valid.
5. The cost of producing high quality video programming has plummeted. While it's not free, it's well within the realm of the affordable.....particularly when evaluated on a cross-channel ROI basis.
6. Consumers start their research in large numbers ON the retail websites. They just don't complete it there.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Can Retailers Recapture Their Voice?
In a time long ago (before this writer was born), retailers had a distinct and recognizable "voice". For consumers of my parents' generation, retailers were a trusted resource for meeting the needs of both their daily life and their aspirational dreams. Even as a young boy, when my mother needed to buy a sewing machine to handle the growing volume of hemming, rehemming and altering required by two growing kids, she got in the car and drove to the store of choice. For my mother, that was Sears. Once there, she looked at the displays, asked a few questions of someone who inevitably didn't know anything of value, and then bought the sewing machine she could afford. It wasn't a tough decision....there was only one at the price point she thought appropriate. However, the lack of choice and the probable unreliability of the salesperson didn't bother her.....she was as Sears. And Sears stood for something in her mind.
Fast forward. The retail landscape became littered with more and more players, distinguished in fewer and fewer ways. Even with the growth and evolution of the megastores like Walmart and Target, there were still so many places and options! And the voice of the retailer had become overshadowed by the voices of consumer products companies. Marketing was ruled by the megabrands and their sophisticated approaches to "must have" purchase motivation. The retailer abdicated their "voice".
Today, brands have become less and less relevant. And the retail landscape is now littered with the empty shells of the over-store boom. Still, retailers, in general, have not recaptured their voice. Part of that is the clutter in marketing communication makes it almost impossible to be heard above the din of competing messages. However, a large part of it is simply that many retailers lost their own idea of what their voice was. What IS the source of your relevancy in the market? Are you simply the last man standing? Are you a player because you control geography? Is "category killer" really a "voice"? Those are questions for another day. Let's assume you DO have a voice and you know what to say with it. Where are you saying it, and what are you using to communicate it with?
Let's wake up and get with the times. The most common place for consumers to find information related to buying merchandise is on the Internet. Period. It's not over the back fence, or through TV commercials, or reading magazines or huge catalogs. It's the web. And strangely, retailers have an enormously powerful platform already on the web from which to create that "voice"..... their ecommerce site. We've talked before about leveraging the ecommerce site as a marketing delivery platform. This post combines that thought with the best medium in which to accomplish this objective.
If you accept that retailers may be in need of reestablishing or reinventing their "voice", isn't video the best medium to do that? Isn't a "voice" just a fancy term for a brand's unique set of emotional connections? And what is a better medium for making those emotional connections than video? All the reasons why TV commercials became the brand medium of choice apply to why online video should become this decade's medium of choice. This is a wake up call: retailers......use your website to reestablish a "voice", and use video to do it with!
Fast forward. The retail landscape became littered with more and more players, distinguished in fewer and fewer ways. Even with the growth and evolution of the megastores like Walmart and Target, there were still so many places and options! And the voice of the retailer had become overshadowed by the voices of consumer products companies. Marketing was ruled by the megabrands and their sophisticated approaches to "must have" purchase motivation. The retailer abdicated their "voice".
Today, brands have become less and less relevant. And the retail landscape is now littered with the empty shells of the over-store boom. Still, retailers, in general, have not recaptured their voice. Part of that is the clutter in marketing communication makes it almost impossible to be heard above the din of competing messages. However, a large part of it is simply that many retailers lost their own idea of what their voice was. What IS the source of your relevancy in the market? Are you simply the last man standing? Are you a player because you control geography? Is "category killer" really a "voice"? Those are questions for another day. Let's assume you DO have a voice and you know what to say with it. Where are you saying it, and what are you using to communicate it with?
Let's wake up and get with the times. The most common place for consumers to find information related to buying merchandise is on the Internet. Period. It's not over the back fence, or through TV commercials, or reading magazines or huge catalogs. It's the web. And strangely, retailers have an enormously powerful platform already on the web from which to create that "voice"..... their ecommerce site. We've talked before about leveraging the ecommerce site as a marketing delivery platform. This post combines that thought with the best medium in which to accomplish this objective.
If you accept that retailers may be in need of reestablishing or reinventing their "voice", isn't video the best medium to do that? Isn't a "voice" just a fancy term for a brand's unique set of emotional connections? And what is a better medium for making those emotional connections than video? All the reasons why TV commercials became the brand medium of choice apply to why online video should become this decade's medium of choice. This is a wake up call: retailers......use your website to reestablish a "voice", and use video to do it with!
Monday, February 1, 2010
Retail Marketers are not using their ecommerce sites fully!
This posting is NOT intended for the executives responsible for the operation and maintenance of the ecommerce site of a multi-channel retailer. It is NOT intended for the executives evaluated solely on producing online sales through the ecommerce site. It IS intended for executives responsible for the marketing budget of multi-channel retailers....particularly those held accountable for measurable impact on sales volume across all channels.
Getting acceptable ROI's from existing methods of driving volume for key items in the assortment is becoming more and more difficult. Every retailer I've worked for or with has had some level of awareness that circulars, inserts and direct mail ALL are diminishing in ROI....to one extent or another.
Here's an answer: use your website to MARKET to your target consumers, not just try to sell specific things to them. Your ecommerce people have done an amazing job of creating effective nav tools, easy to use search options, and are working on individualized product recommendations and display results. Yet.....a huge percentage of the visitors to your site leave without buying anything. Let's market to THOSE people. What are they looking for? Information is one of the top reasons consumers visit ecommerce sites and then leave...they look for it, fail to find it, and search elsewhere. And here's the kicker: once a consumer has become self-educated about the products they need to fulfill their needs.....it's all about price. Yuck.
The problem may not be in understanding that with millions of visitors to your site you have an opt-in audience that MUST be marketed to. The problem may be in HOW to market to that audience without impacting the main purpose of the site - transacting business. Well, maybe the answer is that the main purpose of the site SHOULDN'T be to simply transact online business. Rather, it should be to drive business across all channels. This opens up a lot more area for discussion.
Beyond that, there are technologies available today that make marketing messages deliverable to the consumer without impacting any of your existing nav patterns. Check out Future Merchant's RetailTV® technology.....it's an amazing platform designed to make delivery of the most powerful marketing media available (VIDEO), easy, seamless, and completely integrated. Worth looking into?
Getting acceptable ROI's from existing methods of driving volume for key items in the assortment is becoming more and more difficult. Every retailer I've worked for or with has had some level of awareness that circulars, inserts and direct mail ALL are diminishing in ROI....to one extent or another.
Here's an answer: use your website to MARKET to your target consumers, not just try to sell specific things to them. Your ecommerce people have done an amazing job of creating effective nav tools, easy to use search options, and are working on individualized product recommendations and display results. Yet.....a huge percentage of the visitors to your site leave without buying anything. Let's market to THOSE people. What are they looking for? Information is one of the top reasons consumers visit ecommerce sites and then leave...they look for it, fail to find it, and search elsewhere. And here's the kicker: once a consumer has become self-educated about the products they need to fulfill their needs.....it's all about price. Yuck.
The problem may not be in understanding that with millions of visitors to your site you have an opt-in audience that MUST be marketed to. The problem may be in HOW to market to that audience without impacting the main purpose of the site - transacting business. Well, maybe the answer is that the main purpose of the site SHOULDN'T be to simply transact online business. Rather, it should be to drive business across all channels. This opens up a lot more area for discussion.
Beyond that, there are technologies available today that make marketing messages deliverable to the consumer without impacting any of your existing nav patterns. Check out Future Merchant's RetailTV® technology.....it's an amazing platform designed to make delivery of the most powerful marketing media available (VIDEO), easy, seamless, and completely integrated. Worth looking into?
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