Traditional retail remains a crucial stop on the consumer journey, but having faced the one-two punch of a global pandemic and the nonstop wave of digital innovation, the role of retail is being redefined in real time. How can forward-thinking brands seize this opportunity to unveil retail’s next act?
Retail has been enduring a transformation for decades, from the early collapse of the great American downtown to the abandonment of the suburban shopping mall. Add technology into the mix and the entire sector went back into beta.
So when the global pandemic hit, it’s no surprise that it felt like retail’s impending death was upon us. But a closer look at consumer behaviors — before and after COVID — sheds some light on the opportunity for forward-looking brands. Embracing the role of digital promises the next retail renaissance.
The Shift from Buying to Shopping Already Happened
Traditional retail’s slowdown is attributed to consumers’ pursuit of convenience. It’s all the things that digital does really well, and while that’s certainly a threat to brick-and-mortar, this version of the story is incomplete. The reality is that pre-COVID, traditional brick-and-mortar retail actually saw an uptick in recent years. So what’s really going on?
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Retail can’t compete with a digital push toward convenience, nor should it try to. When you consider that, in 2019, 70% of people said they’d prefer to shop in store vs. digitally, it seems that consumers are trying to tell us they don’t just care about the convenience of buying, and are actually seeking out the shopping experience.
Deconstructing the Consumer Mindset
We’re all emerging from the pandemic starved of connection, community and even the simple pleasures of commerce. So as retail returns, we can expect consumers to move beyond the necessity of essential goods — but to what? We imagine that consumers will crave a more connected and meaningful experience dictated by the things they missed — the luxury of time, conversation, contact and the simple delight of life outside of the computer screen. In other words, all the inefficiencies and frictions of modern life.
In 2019, econsultancy made a claim: “Friction is the enemy of modern retail — and indeed the consumer.” But not all friction is created equal. It can lead to consumer frustration, but friction also refers to the parts that are emotive, imperfectly human and delightfully unpredictable.
Historically, innovation in the retail space has focused on smoothing out friction, but shopping innovation is about celebrating it. There are key moments in the consumer journey where we can celebrate that friction and ultimately innovate the shopping journey.
Driving Delight Through Discovery
Discovery is the emotional peak of the purchase journey — full of possibilities and lacking in consequential decisions. It’s an essential but often overlooked first step in the shopping experience that happens in both digital and analog.
Q: Both digital and analog discovery have their benefits, but how might we bring them together to build a supercharged discovery experience?
A: Brands can use data to deliver smart serendipitous moments across the consumer journey by connecting that data with technology and connectivity.
As visual search becomes platform-agnostic, consumers can search and discover added context for anything that’s in front of them. And with the advancing portability of technology, interactive retail experiences will be able to break out of physical limitations. VR and AR shopping experiences are quickly becoming accessible to more brands. We can now imagine a world where most shops can create an immersive experience.
Building Trust Through Personal Attention
When trying to build trust with consumers, brands need to prioritize accessibility, which means being available for a genuine two-way interaction. This is the ultimate friction moment.
Retail has cornered this market by design — from the record store clerk making personalized music recommendations to the garden center staffer explaining how to care for your succulents. Personal attention in-store adds an imperfect humanity to the interaction, while online the FAQs and chatbots replace that humanity with facts and information.
Q: How might we combine the depth of humanity and the breadth of technology to create more friction and super serve a customer who wants to be heard and helped?
A: Think digital-first even IRL to augment the shopping experience with personalized support, advice and inspiration.
We’re moving toward a reality where we skip over the personal shopper to the personal shop. Brands could create exclusive access to curated experiences driven by personal preference and data, unified across ecommerce and app platforms.
There’s also a near-term future where a dedicated assistant (person or machine) could know you as you enter the store, offering recommendations based on previous purchases, identifying discounts or offering advice.
This experience could translate to an entirely digital sandbox — a personal shopping bot that keeps you engaged, through new releases and inventory updates, to anticipate and enhance the consumer experience.
Creating Advocacy Through Brand Experience
Where discovery is the consumer’s emotional peak, advocacy is Everest for the business. Building advocacy is essential for long-term brand health and lives at the core of a meaningful relationship between the consumer and the brand. Of course it impacts the bottom line, but here’s the tension: advocacy is driven by all the things you do outside of the transaction. In other words, the brand experience.
Every moment that a consumer engages with a brand contributes to the brand experience, but advocacy is born from those interactions where the brand seeks nothing in return. Historically, physical was the canvas for big and bold experiential expressions of this, while digital leveraged the power of data.
Q: How might we use the canvas of retail to inspire an evolved digitally-powered experience to not only meet the consumer where they are, but bring them to where they want to be?
A: Today’s consumers are more interested in creating memories than buying stuff, so brands need to rethink their worlds and inspire consumers to get lost in them.
For instance, physical retail is full of IRL magic — sensorially experiencing the looks, feels and sounds of a brand. Yet that magic deepens when it feels like it’s been created for you. What if brands could combine the two to make an in-store hyper-personalized brand experience, where consumer data worked harder to delight than convert and felt purpose-built? Imagine if instead of telling the history, brands invited the consumer to collaborate on the future by giving them a role in building it? In a hyper-connected world, brands still need an invitation into the consumer’s world, but there’s no longer a single front door.
The Cost of Inaction is High
The pandemic will be a sea change moment for every brand, business and consumer. Amongst its many reckonings, COVID has created a chasm between shopping and buying mindsets in the purchase journey, but this separation has revealed a huge opportunity. Traditional retail is a mainline to a new-era consumer. As this consumer returns to normal, a study of their emerging expectations and demands will signpost the route to innovation. And wherever consumer behavior shifts, romancing the moments of friction will be key to inspiring them to fall in love with the brand in new ways.
Karen Staughton is West Coast Engagement Director at Grow, based in Portland, Ore. She began her career in the UK music industry running her own award-winning agency, then as Head of Digital at Columbia Records, before shifting focus to brands like Converse, Coca-Cola and Spotify. In 2015 she became a mom, a repatriated American and an agency brand strategist in quick succession, and has since worked to launch campaigns and experiences for YouTube Music, Blue Apron, Adidas, Nike, and Google. Her work has been featured in The Drum, AdWeek, Contagious, Campaign, and has been recognized by Cannes Lions and Lovie Awards. Staughton approaches her life and work with healthy cynicism, unstoppable curiosity, and a real ‘why’ obsession in hopes of finding the interesting. You can find her sharing thoughts and questions on strategy, creativity and the world on Twitter.
