Shopper experience marketing has become a must
according to you?
B.H.: “It is not a new idea: at the end of the
nineties Pine & Gilmore already wrote a study about the importance of the shopper
experience. ‘Customer experience’ however has become crucial since the rise of
the internet: especially the non-food sector feels threatened by the ever
rising popularity of e-commerce.
Cor Molenaar says one in four physical stores will
have to shut down. Anyone who wants to stay in the game has to make shopping really fun. Shops should be more than a space where products are being displayed.”
How can shopping become such fun?
B.H.: “There are different ways to get people
to your shop. Either your promise to the client is straightforward, such as the
lowest price or the best product, or it is all about the experience you
provide. On the internet there is a lot to experience for the consumer: everything is
fast and visual, because customers can see pictures, compare specifications,
watch ‘making of’-films or fashion shows and so forth.
Offline retail also has to start making a
dynamic impression. Shopping has to become more sensory: the biggest possible advantage
of physical stores is they can play at all five senses, something which is
impossible online. Retailers have to start doing this consistently, but in a
pragmatic way: it is not about technology for technology’s sake.”
What is your opinion on cross-channel?
B.H.: “It is very important that there is cross-fertilization
between offline and online. To achieve that, the retailer has to take two
essential steps: first he has to create visibility online, second is to bring
the internet to the physical store. In that way you connect those two and you
make them into a coherent story. A retailer can, for example, use technology
such as an in-store touchscreen with connection to the internet to bring the complete assortment to the customer in
the store.
Furthermore there still is a group of people
that wants to get helped in a store. People who know what they want can be
serviced online, but that is not always the case. Sometimes personal advice and
real guidance just is necessary and the internet can never completely fulfll that need.”
Everywhere we here the consumer is changing.
But why is this so threatening for shops?
B.H.: “It is no longer just about a crisis
in retail, but about a real shift in the retail landscape. If physical shops do not
quickly succeed in appealing to the consumer, then they will soon disappear. If you
can not find what what you are looking for offline, you can often easily find your product
on the internet. Location is becoming ever more important for offline retailers: the
concentration in ‘experience centres’ will become higher, while B-locations will
disappear.
According to Bart De Waele of communication
agency Wijs, we are only at the beginning of the digitalisation of our society. The
current generation of thirty-somethings and forty year-olds still have known separate appliances
for each use – camera, mobile phone, navigation, and so on – but today
everything can be found in one device and soon that evolution will go even
further. Everything will be completely integrated and we will let ourselves to
be guided by digital data.
How we should imagine this? Think about how
dependant we are on our navigation systems: most of the time we just about know
where we are going, but still we have a blind trust in this machine and we
start feeling lost without it. This will start happening throughout our entire
society and also in retail.”
How can social media help?
B.H.: “It used to be true that products were the
focus, but today the relation with the customer is at the centre. A retailer has to
build a ‘community’ of people that love his brand(s). We know from earlier experience
that if there also is a good feedback to the shopping floor – for instance by
pointing to social media on video screens – you create a powerful group of
customers with whom it is very easy to communicate.”
Still, in times of crisis, this surely is not the moment
to invest?
B.H.: “There’s no other option. The choice is
between investing and going bankrupt. It is true these are difficult times to
invest, but you can not see this kind of an investment as purely a cost.
Today we can calculate exactly what the cost
per day will be and how much you will profit from it, as Resatec will prove at
the ‘Shopper Experience Marketing’-seminar. Shopper experience isn ot something
vague and intangible: it can be expressed in cold hard facts, by registering
and counting customers and their movements.
Still we see that some retailers are very
conservative and afraid to lose floor space to video screens or internet
columns. This is a completely wrong attitude. Luckily the mentality is
changing.”
What is the message of the “Shopper experience
marketing”-seminar?
B.H.: “We focus on marketers and sales
representatives in retail. We want to show that shops offer unique
possibilities. Retails who embrace technology in a smart and pragmatic way and
as such optimise the shopper experience will know a successful future.
What we will do at the pre-congress, is give
them insights to think about and to help them develop a plan of action to have
their shops gain power, so they will not end up being one in four shops to
close down, as prof. Molenaar suggests.”
‘Shopper experience marketing’ is a seminar held before the RetailDetail Congress on Thursday 25 April
in San Marco Village in Schelle (near Antwerp). The complete program of the seminar (PDF) can be
found here. Participation in the seminar also includes free entry to the RetailDetail Congress; for registration please visit www.retaildetailcongres.be.
