These days, it feels as if everyone is focused on brick-and-mortar vs. e-commerce. But that’s where the problem lies. This isn’t a competition and brick-and-mortar isn’t dead.
It is said that the average person spends five hours a day online. That gives us 19 hours a day to provide value and services offline and engage audiences. Technology and marketing have changed and the way people shop has also changed but our desire and need to connect as a community hasn’t—this is something we still crave.
Historically, shops were the places you went to gossip, socialize, and purchase for leisure. They’ve been the pillars of our communities since the Industrial Revolution. Today’s stores are still the places to congregate and share information, but digital has added a new layer to the mix. It extends the community, taking it to a global scale. But the need for human touch and in-person interaction still exist.
Physical stores will always be around, while digital gives us a new layer of connectivity–another way to engage with customers. So instead of seeing digital as a threat, we can leverage it to improve the in-store experience and make it something truly worth their while. Use digital to produce additional touchpoints for your brand and to deepen relationships with customers. Remember, your shoppers may not always buy offline but they may buy online after a store visit or turn into your digital brand loyalists.
E-Commerce Shops See the Value in Offline
The potential of merging both worlds isn’t a secret. Just look at the number of online brands that have started opening brick-and-mortar stores, physical pop-ups, and offline showrooms in times of record brick-and-mortar closures. These brands include Reformation, Bonobos, MM. LaFleur, and Warby Parker –a company with plans to open at least 25 physical shops this year alone.
Let’s take a look at their showroom offerings. These are excellent examples of finding creative ways to bridge digital with offline. For instance, customers can’t shop at Bonobos’ Guideshops. They’re physical locations focusing on fit, style advice, and in-person returns. Meanwhile, MM. LaFleur has showrooms in D.C. and NYC where visitors can shop personalized, pre-pulled looks and enjoy styling sessions with their glasses of champagne. Any purchases are immediately shipped to their homes or offices for free. Reformation has more of a hybrid approach with limited quantities of merchandise in store backed by digital screens for making in-person online orders.
There are so many creative ways we can combine physical locations with digital experiences.
What these brands understand is that–as a species–we inherently value physical touch. It’s just how we’re wired. Touch is tied to human emotion, human behavior, and even our development as kids. In fact, there’s a great 2014 study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, indicating how using a touchscreen interface produces the psychological perception of ownership leading to an amplification of the benefits we get when we acquire something new. But Reformation isn’t the only one to benefit. The same research has been correlated to touching other tactile objects as well, including merchandise in stores.
When you consider that touch is a natural instinct that produces positive emotions, you wouldn’t want to keep your focus entirely online. At the same time, technology is making an undeniable impact on how we lead our lives. To embrace one and not the other is to not see the full picture… everything has changed and nothing has changed at all!
Forget “Omnichannel”. It’s Just Retail.
Alibaba shares a similar sentiment and they’re ahead of them all. The massive retailer recently made headlines with their $2.6 billion mall operator buy. The firm owns 29 department stores and 17 shopping malls across urban areas in China. This was just another rung in a much larger strategy, including the purchase of a major Chinese retail brand in 2015.
Alibaba’s intentions are clear – to take physical shops up to the level of modern shoppers’ standards using their enormous digital resources and associated strengths (better inventory management, streamlined digital payments, real-time customer insights and data, et al.). The plan is to introduce new customers to the physical stores and to strengthen their entire retail community–on an offline. Their CEO (Daniel Zhang) definitely has the right idea– “We don’t divide the world into real or virtual economies, only the old and the new”.
The future is always uncertain but one thing is clear. We have to continue to change with the times and learn how to disrupt ourselves before we get disrupted.
Syama Meagher
CEO, Scaling Retail
Tel: 310.957.5364
www.ScalingRetail.com
Add Comment