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Trends: Raising the Stakes
Chain Store Age,
August 05, 2008
by Katherine Field
"Madison Avenue has lost its iron-clad control of the message," said Dr. Nita Rollins, executive director of marketing for the Columbus, Ohio-based interactive marketing and technology company Resource Interactive. "Brand marketers have begun to cede control of the brands—that they themselves created and managed—to the customers."
This shift of complete control from the marketer to the consumer is something Rollins calls "customer brand co-creation," and it stems largely from a growing trend that allows customers to "spread the word" about a brand—accomplished through Web logs, or "blogs." Customers, through blogging, can share product insights, rank products, and thus impact brands in a manner that removes the control from the brand's owner. This trend has arisen, according to Rollins, from the customers' requirement to have input in the products they buy. "Because of the Internet, customers know so much more about the products under consideration, and they expect to participate in the values that are assigned to those products," said Rollins.
What this means for retailers is that they have to figure out how to create a new kind of relationship with customers, both on line and off, and find a way to allow customers to have brand input. And what it will require is a dialogue between retailer and customer.
Internet dialogue can come largely in the form of blogging. No longer limited to just a way for customers to provide input, retailers are getting into the blogging act as well. According to Mark Goldstein, CEO of Loyalty Lab, a San Francisco-based developer of customer-loyalty programs, blogging is an effective way for retailers to engage customers in a two-way communication. "Retailers, by taking an active role in the blogging space, are emulating the off-line world on line," said Goldstein. "They're borrowing stores' attempts to interact with local customer communities, such as schools, churches, charitable organizations and athletic clubs, and trying to reach deeper into smaller, interested customer segments." They do this, explained Goldstein, by launching their own blogs, employing bloggers and actively tracking, posting or communicating with blogs that comment on their brand or industry.
Effective dialoguing, whether through blogging or other messaging means, must take new media, like digital mobile devices, into consideration. "We've all been saying for years that content is king," said Rollins. "But we still have fallen short in supplying all these new media with the kinds of content that would be appropriate for the functionality of the devices, for the sizes of the devices, and for the appetites of the customers." Digital media and wildly increasing customer touchpoints mean that content must become interactive, inspirational, instructive and brand experience-enriching, said Rollins.
Moreover, content must incorporate something that bricks-and-mortar retailers learned long ago but forgot to introduce to e-commerce: visual merchandising. "That's a puzzling phenomenon," said Rollins. "It's as if, suddenly, 3-D retailers forgot that white products on a white background won't work. Despite the fact that they learned the basics long ago in bricks-and-mortar retail, they neglected—until recently—to incorporate those lessons into the e-commerce presence." Some of the basics that retailers are remembering on line are effective copy that communicates a story and lifestyle positioning of products.
An off-line experience that Resource Interactive's Rollins wants retailers to forget is the shopping cart. Instead, she suggested, research has shown that a persistent and multi-purpose shopping hub, allowing shoppers to drag and drop items into a holding place for consideration prior to checkout, would vastly improve the customer experience. "The hub is a departure from the cart," said Rollins, "and we predict it will be an up-and-coming trend."