Consumer Product Brands are Now E-Commerce Brands

May 11th, 2012 by in Integrated Digital Marketing

Marketers of consumer goods used to have the luxury of pretending that e-commerce was a nice-to-have capability. But with e-commerce sales more than doubling globally during the past 5 years—and expected to double again by 2014—it doesn’t matter what products are in your portfolio, selling to consumers requires an e-commerce strategy.

Today the battle for market share has expanded from shelf space to mind space, and the new winners have figured out how to engage consumers at multiple points of purchase that increasingly have nothing to do with a brick and mortar visit. Consider these global e-commerce trends:

+ US e-commerce sales will grow 62% by 2016, to USD 327 billion (Source: Forrester, February 2012).
+ European e-commerce sales will grow by 78% by 2016, to USD 230 billion (Source: Forrester, February 2012).
+ Brazilian e-commerce sales will grow 21.9% in 2012 to USD 18.7 billion (Source: eMarketer, January 2012).
+ Chinese e-commerce sales were CNY 780 billion (USD 124 billion) in 2011, an increase of 66% from 2010. E-commerce is expected to rise from 3% of consumption to 7% by 2015 (Source: IDC, March 2012).
+ India’s e-commerce market is expected to grow to USD 70 billion by 2020, from just USD 600 million in 2011 (Source: Technopak Advisors, February 2012).
+ Indonesian e-commerce sales are forecast to grow from USD 120 million in 2010 to USD 650 million by 2015 (Source: Frost & Sullivan, February 2012).

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The SoLoMo Path To Purchase

May 9th, 2012 by in Integrated Digital Marketing

A funny thing happened on the path to purchase last year – it disappeared. The emergence of the SoLoMo consumer – socially enabled, location-aware, and mobile-device-connected – has turned the path to purchase into a minefield. The marketing funnel is no longer linear – it’s a convoluted mess that changes with every new Pinterest, Path, Shopkick, or Perch. Durable goods brands can create and sustain a differentiated presence by better understanding these consumer behaviors and purchase drivers:

People relate to brands on their own terms

“Don’t tell me, don’t show me, engage me” has become a prevailing consumer mantra, played out millions of times a day in social media and in customer service centers around the world. Consumers, not brands, are in control of the retail experience and the relationships they have with brands. To compete, brands must create interesting, intriguing content. Understand how people want to connect and engage with your brand. Enable people to share content with your brand and their social networks – and nurture these interactions into conversations and relationships based on what people want.

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Retailing is broken. The fix is “all-in digital.”

January 13th, 2012 by in Emerging Experiences

By Scott Doniger, Executive Director, Strategy and Planning, [wire] stone

Retailers are reeling. Prolonged recession, a shrinking middle class, global competition, Groupon, LivingSocial, Amazon Prime, “every-when” enabled consumers, smart phones and smarter devices, sensing technologies, cloud-based gaming, virtual clothes-changing programs, 3D showrooms, social commerce and gaming, Level-Up, Foursquare, Etsy, Gilt, Pinterest, NFC and mobile wallets, digital coupons, device-enabled sales staff, LiveChat customer service…the list grows every week. Optimists see opportunity. Most see trouble.

Has e-commerce already dis-intermediated the physical store, like online has in newsprint? Some are right to think so. There is growing evidence that digital channel commerce just might displace brick and mortar. Among others, here’s a recent study validating that the motivation to shop in-store is decreasing:

“Digital usage and ecommerce increase when women become moms. Two recent studies show that women spend less time with media outlets such as TV and magazines—but more time online—during pregnancy and after becoming a mom. An Eric Mower and Associates survey, for example, found that more than half of new mothers spend less time watching TV (59%) and reading magazines (55%), and that 59% spent less time shopping in stores as a result.”

 

Sure, new moms will actually shop more and will be less inclined to go to stores. But do retailers want to make the risky assumption that this data is not a harbinger of a major fault line trend that confirms the question “if the experience shopping offline continues to get better, will people ever really need to shop in-store?”. We think this risk isn’t worth taking.

Brick and mortar sure seems broken – see Blockbuster, Borders, Kmart, Comp USA — who’s next to file chapter 11? But we are bullish on brick and mortar because our vision of the in-store future (unfolding on a few beachheads already) is that, done right, digital in-store is a game-changer. Retailers who don’t sprint to their own digital future will soon realize it’s game over if they don’t.

If the pace of chaotic, rampant disruption is roaring ahead, can retailers run fast enough? They can – IF they go “all-in digital”. We urge retailers to completely re-think how customers use digital devices to connect, share, and buy today – and how they’ll do so in the future. We propose that winning retailers will create their own scalable, sustainable, personalized, and digitally enabled path-to-purchase models, engagement platforms, and technical infrastructures, all driven by evidence-based learning specific to their domain. Here’s a short list of guiding principles as we see them today retailers of all types should embrace to go “all-in digital”:

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Health Marketing 2012-2016: Disruption At Hand

January 10th, 2012 by in Integrated Digital Marketing

[wire] stone has released a must-read study on the key forces that will impact healthcare marketers during the next 5 years. Our comprehensive assessment of consumer trends, industry changes, emerging technologies and new operational models captures the essence of a disruption in progress.

The “data age” of health marketing—signaled by the maturing of mobile/local technologies, the rise of the connected patient, and the emergence of new success metrics—are at the root cause of a new portfolio of marketing strategies healthcare marketers will be forced to consider. Key findings of the study are summarized here:

 

Changing Business Models

If you’re a healthcare marketing chief – particularly of a major hospital — it’s scary to think about standing in front of your hospital’s board of directors and explaining how you plan to chart a future course for the brand by keeping patients out of your hospital. But several converging forces—including federal health reform, population dynamics, and mobile/social/local technologies—are leading marketers to focus their strategies to delivering healthcare to patients without delivering patients to healthcare facilities.

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The 4 things flash sale sites need to do to stay relevant in 2012

December 28th, 2011 by in Integrated Digital Marketing

Between Groupon, Living Social, Woot, and now Inc. Deals, I’m being flashed several times a day. Groupon even flashed me bright and early on Christmas Day; hours before the torrent of Day after Christmas sale promotions hit my inbox. Don’t get me wrong; I love a good flash sale. However, as a consumer and strategy planner, I expect more. I expect less flashing and more matching.

Why is there so little matching? To begin with, the daily deal site landscape is way too crowded. Yipit, an aggregator owned by Groupon, collects daily deals from 792 daily deal sites. There is little chance for true differentiation, most daily deals are for food and personal grooming – how many chemical peels can a girl have before her face has been burnt like toast? And don’t get me started with the lack of personalization – guys do you really like getting those Brazilian blowout offers? I didn’t think so.

Deal of the day sites don’t make refunds. When I’ve had buyer’s remorse, I’ve given the offers away. But according to a Rice University study, 20 percent of coupons are never redeemed.  So what should flash sales sites do? While I was getting my second pedicure (flash deal) this month (during non-sandal season), I thought about four things they can do:

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Flight of the {Air Jordan} Concords

December 23rd, 2011 by in Integrated Digital Marketing

No sneaker ever looked as good as the Air Jordan 11, Concord blue edition. I remember watching Jordan rise in ’96 wearing a variety of colorways of this insanely crafted and designed flying apparatus. So when the Jordan Brand chiefs decided to drop the Concord retro edition last night (well, December 23, starting at 12:01 am est), which most followers heard about as early as August, my Jordan retro crack addiction kicked into high gear.

I jumped onto nike.com at exactly 8:58 pm pst – opening not one, but four browsers – to ensure my IP address would be as early in line as possible. Nothing. No picture in the “new releases” tab; no link on the home page. 9:08 – a picture appears in “new releases”…but clicking brings me to a blank page. The site is down. Footlocker.com is down. Hordes are collapsing every possible digital outlet. I can envision millions of snearkerheads hacking nike.com, and I’m lamenting the fact that some, who Jordan brand managers from Beaverton court for their overt enthusiasm online and at sneakerhead conventions, are already in and ordering away. @dabu1285 (former Jordan Brand client and one of the coolest people I’ve ever met) tweets “footlocker site down, another one bites the dust”, so I feel pretty good that even he hasn’t been able to get through.

Some perspective. There is more magic here than the mere fact that there are so many people coveting this most baddass sneaker ever invented that the Nike.com site has crashed. The brand sprung from the other-worldliness of MJ’s athletic domination and indominatable personality, and it’s now as relevant and pervasive 26 years later than it ever was. Old white guys like me still wear and covet the sneakers, millions upon millions of younger fans literally in every corner of the world can be found wearing apparel. If you’ve ever experienced MJ entering a room, it’s like the air is sucked out behind him as he floats through. Think Neo, twisting around bullets. As a 25-year marketer and media analyst, and now a strategist at a digital marketing agency, @wirestone [wire] stone, the only comparison I can think of to the Jordan retro phenomenon are lines forming around Apple stores in anticipation of i-anything introductions. I just can’t help but think that every brand would love to have this kind of passion for its products, for its history, for its presence, for its imagination. True, most brands were not birthed by larger-than-life, globally recognized icons. But the strategist in me thinks this is a standard to shoot for. Damn straight it is.

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