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!
Thursday, February 4, 2010
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