In the last 20 years, Amazon has changed the way we conduct commerce online, and this January, for the first time in its short history, Amazon has opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle (the second will open in San Diego this summer). Until now, the eCommerce juggernaut never had the privilege of meeting its customers in real life, but it had something even better – incredible amounts of data. And it used consumer data to get to know its shoppers really, really well.
While online innovations have outdone some of the benefits of physical shopping, Amazon knew that people are still yearning for the traditional shopping experience. Perhaps, it is no coincidence that the bookstore opening coincides with the recent decline of e-book sales. The store leans on consumer data to display to its customers what they are looking for – every book displayed on the shelves comes with a star rating, a review count, and a quote from an online reader.
The Death of Retail as We Know It?
Amazon Books is signaling a major change; data-driven, online businesses are bringing their knowledge about the customers into physical retail stores. While some retailers have downsized and others despaired completely in the last few years, retail shops are not going anywhere. In fact, according to this Economist Intelligence Unit report, retail sales are growing both in developing and emerging markets, such as India (17%), China (13,7%), and even the United States (5%). The lines between physical and digital shopping are blurring, and the convenience previously reserved only for online shopping will soon be the foundation of tomorrow’s shops.
So it isn’t just your store that might be in a need of rebranding, it’s your way of doing retail business altogether that could use a tune-up. Expanding brands from online to physical shops is certainly a practice that is yet untested, nevertheless, you shouldn’t be afraid of this experience. Just be careful.
The Offline Fight for Brand Awareness
One of the biggest challenges for retailers is gaining customer attention; the amount of information available on the internet is not only leading to well-informed, knowledgeable customers, it leads to indecision. While many retailers have failed to react to the ever-changing demands, one innovative way of capturing the customer’s attention was Selfridge’s “No-Noise” experiment from 2013 that featured name-brand items with no logos. According to Alannah Weston, Selfridge’s creative director, the experiment was inviting people to “find a moment of peace in a world where we are bombarded by a cacophony of information”.
Conclusion
Consumers are integrating technology into each step of the “consumer’s journey”, in fact, according to a study by Bain & Company, over 60% of all retail transactions are either executed online or influenced by the internet. Furthermore, Dunnhumby, the world’s biggest customer science company, claims that the “multichannel shoppers” are spending over five times as much as those who only shop online.
Universal connectivity is one of the major challenges for retailers of tomorrow. For instance, mobile signals can be weak in-store, and setting up store-wide Wi-Fi during busy holiday periods can be pretty difficult. However, creating a unique, seamless shopping experience across all platforms requires more than a good Wi-Fi connection. It requires a consistent experience across multiple platforms, online and offline, throughout the customer’s journey.