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Customers In Control: The New Gatekeepers Of The Online Shopping Experience

By Doug Heise, CoreMedia

 

As customers take greater control over how, when and where they buy, they’re displacing brands and retail stores as the gatekeepers of the shopping experience. In fact, they can avoid interacting directly with the retailer completely — never having to visit their homepage, online store or physical store — yet still able to purchase their products. What happens when traditional retailers and brands get left out of the direct shopping experience? How did we get here and what can these companies do to access their customers in a new de-centralized era?

In the pre-Internet era, the relationship between a brand and its customers was fairly predictable and was mediated by a stable collection of gatekeepers and middlemen. But the ability to purchase goods online upended the linear process of offline sales.

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The first step in this process was the disruption of the traditional relationship between retailers and manufacturers. As manufacturers began to sell directly via the web, retailers found themselves in direct competition with the brands themselves. Recent research from these manufacturers has indicated that this shift resulted in significant improvements in their customer relationships, customer experience and revenue. But it has also shut out retailers as consumers opted to buy directly from the manufacturer. 

But this has now progressed to where shoppers are able to discover products, research features, interact with other shoppers, and even make purchases from within their social networks, directly from search engines, or via community apps — widening the gap between them and the brand, and lessening its influence and control. 

Visually immersive social networks like Pinterest or Instagram provide their audience with a constantly changing mash-up of product images from a boggling array of global brands and manufacturers. Socially curated “wardrobe” apps like Stylebook, Closet, or Pose allow consumers to share and compare their virtual walk-in closets with all of their online friends. And massive aggregated shopping sites hosted by Internet giants like Amazon, Google and Yahoo are increasingly becoming the first and only stop for many online shoppers. 

Now both retailers and manufacturers are faced with loosing more that just revenue in this new wave of disruption — now their relationship with the customer is in jeopardy as well. Consumer loyalty to brands is strong. But as the new gatekeepers grow in influence and more and more of the shopper’s journey shifts to social networks and community apps, how will they continue to exert an influence on their customers? 

There are two answers to this conundrum. The first is for retailers and manufacturers to understand how customer behavior operates across these new channels and to construct their messaging so that it meets customer expectations and maximizes the benefits of theses new forms of interaction. People who shop and discover products on social networks behave differently than shoppers who visit an online store directly. Retailers who don’t understand this are bound to fail.

The second answer is to provide personalized and entertaining brand experiences on their home sites and online stores that are not available anywhere else. Both approaches will require a deep understanding of customers and their buying patterns — as well as flexible and dynamic publishing tools for blending content and commerce into unique hybrid objects that can be published anywhere.

 

Doug Heise serves as Global Director of Product Marketing for CoreMedia. Doug has over 17 years of experience as a digital media strategist and marketing specialist. Doug began his career as a co-founder and Senior Analyst with The Content Group, a San Francisco-based consulting and professional services firm that was one of the first companies to focus exclusively on the field of digital media management.

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