Empowering Shopping with Multimodality, Omni-Channel Approach for Omniscient Consumers
Online Shopping Ecommerce
“The purpose of a business is to create a customer – Peter F Drucker”
Social networking, social media and consumer research insights have become integral aspects of a brand and their consumers shopping experiences.
Brands today are so focused on whether they are trending on twitter, if they have more ‘likes’ on facebook and ‘x number of views’ on YouTube that the core aspect of business is lost somewhere in between. The idea and purpose of any business is without a doubt, to create a customer.
More customers result in higher volume of sales, better revenues, profits, which in turn would enable the business to invest and grow faster as they can then focus on better quality of products and more personalization.
The first and foremost approach towards planning a digital marketing or a social media campaign is “integrating what really matters to your end readers using tools that will help them consume that information in the least amount of time possible”.
In other words, content that is relevant and resourceful. Once done, they then need to ensure to create and or merge at-home and or in-store and mobile commerce shopping as one seamless experience.
There are mainly three aspects which need to be integrated to make or enable this process for the consumer of today.
- Multimodality, it explains the communication practices in terms of textual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual resources – or modes in which one can compose messages. Ensure that you empower them with small ‘gif’s’, may be a vine or an instagram video, relevant content in the form of a pdf that they can easily download.
- Omni-channel: Within this process, the systems of an organization needs to be fully integrated to provide consumer research insights simultaneously across various platforms. What’s more important is that, every member (staff) who will directly or otherwise be interacting and or engaging with the customer (online or offline) needs to have access to this information.
Eg. Let’s say, a brand has a system and or a process wherein a customer who has even if only once purchased their product, is given a card (physical or on mobile as an app) with an online user-id which he or she can access and or login on the company’s website while browsing for more products or even swipe or scan when they enter the in-store locations of the brand. Now as soon as the customer does this, when they are actually in-store; their previous transactions, purchases, including the browsing patterns and search done on their brand’s website is seen by the local employees accessing this information at the backend. This information is then shared with the salesperson immediately in case of an in-store walk-in, who then approaches the customer more confidently and offers a much more personalized experience of shopping.
3. Take another scenario wherein the customer has already bought the product online and has just dropped in to pick up the same. Now if the sales persons are already aware of this due to the information seamlessly available, the entire process of this particular customer enquiring and sharing all the information from the start with the store personnel becomes irrelevant. At the same time, the customer is elated with the brand for saving so much of their time and they always have a psychologically positive feeling or incentive, of feeling wonderful since the in-store team already knows who they are and greets and interacts with them accordingly. This would truly be a seamless experience.
Now as we look into the omniscient consumer of today, we can’t ignore the question, ‘Why are there so many empty shopping malls these days?’
Well, consumers are able to experience a very personalized, convenient shopping experience online and that coupled with bonus incentives of discounts from the comforts of their home. Plus, due to massive consumer research data being available across major shopping sites, the patterns of returning customers, the categories that they usually browse etc being accessible to brands easily, the power to deliver relevant messages and most important of all, the ease of even after-sales services like returning the purchases / exchange has become so simple.
Moreover, the customer of today has the ability to become a brand ambassador of a product or review it on a public platform in a matter of seconds with or without the approval of the brand and or organization, making the entire experience a power-rush too.
Have you noticed, how eager consumers are to talk about a brand, especially if they are specially invited by the brand to do so? Here again, brands needs to have an ‘instant gratification’ process in place for their brand ambassadors online.
“The omniscient consumer today literally knows more about the brand than the brand itself.”
As brands today have shifted from merely using digital marketing and or social media to add more likes or hits to their sites or even increase brand engagement and conversations, to ensuring there are actual sales conversions, all of it in real-time, the era of the all knowing customer takes a precedence in terms of personalization of the said products for ease of use, consumption, delivery and the entire sale experience.
With the growing new age tools and increased consumer research data available with brands today, one can only hope that organizations create a balance and comfort for customers in which, irrespective of where or how they shop, online or in-store, both their time is saved and their shopping experience becomes more satisfactory with each purchase to ensure they keep coming back for more!
Do share your comments, views on this, would love to hear from you.
Have a wonderful day ahead.
Be Well
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