Archive for the ‘Retail’ Category

You can take a horse to water…

May 10th, 2010

The web is a marvel that has transformed the way consumers interact with the suppliers of goods and services, but it has not changed some of the basic rules of merchandising. Over the last few years the BBC has run a few series featuring Mary Porter the ‘Queen of Shops’, where our inimitable heroine has been challenged to improve the retail performance of an assortment of different shops, ranging from the super fashionable to the charitable end of the perspective.

Some of her focus has been on signage and window displays in an effort to attract more visitors to the individual shops, but far more emphasis has been placed on what merchandise is bought, and crucially how this merchandise is displayed. Online retailers of both goods and services would do well to understand the importance of this distinction. It is all very well developing a highly optimised website that ensures that relevant keyword searches drive traffic to your site, or indeed targeting specific paid-for-search copy to attract visitors to specific features within your site.

However the key to successful deployment of search budgets is the adoption of a holistic approach that goes beyond making your site findable, but also facilitates transactions for prospective purchasers. This means considering the usability of sites both from the point of view of being able to quickly identify the specific goods or services within a site, and also being able to complete an informed purchase with the minimum of hassle.

As the Queen of Shops would tell you, there is no point having your best selling items in a dark room at the back of the shop and only having one till operator for a queue of thirty customers; especially if you have just spent thousands painting the outside and dressing the window. The same applies to search, where the most effective budgets will utilise search spending as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy and the best search practitioners will understand the wider ramifications for servicing the customers that they drive to your site.

Blog post by James Kilpatrick, non-Executive Director of Reform

Adding value to online retail: the in-store shopping experience

February 21st, 2010

With time to kill in between appointments last week I found myself in Top Shop’s flagship store on Oxford Street in London. Not for the first time I was struck by how different the shopping experience is. Indeed Top Shop is less of a shop nowadays, more like a nightclub-cum-youth club-cum-beauty salon. With TVs and music blaring, girls of all ages (thirteen up to forty!) were browsing, chatting, phoning, texting. Oh and there was some purchasing going on too. Top Shop is a real-life social media experience.

Back in the virtual world, in December 2009 £5.46 billion was spent online in the UK, a 17% increase y-o-y. According to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, the Clothing sector saw an 18% annual increase in online spend and Accessories in particular saw a phenomenal 101% annual increase. Driven by a quest for shopping on demand, online retail, or e-tail, is certainly thriving.

The challenge for both online and bricks and mortar retailers is that the Millennial generation – defined as the mid-teens to late twenties who have grown up in a digital world – are a fickle bunch. They want social interaction but they also want a highly personal experience. They expect you (the retail brand) to know exactly what they want, and they want to have it now. They have been spoilt by the instant gratification of Google, and the infinite choice of niche sellers that the Web has to offer. It’s all about me, or “me-tail”, after all.

Customer acquisition and retention strategies must therefore be cross-media and highly targeted. Indeed, in its Industry Report entitled ‘The “me-tail” revolution’, Accenture urges retailers to radically reinvent themselves, and cite the example of Domino’s Pizza’s use of Facebook and mobile phone apps – as well as TV – to facilitate orders, and Best Buy’s leveraging of Twitter to answer customer queries.  According to Accenture, it won’t be long before this new generation of always-on customers spurns the concept of retail grazing.

Whereas for the last ten years, retailers have been trying to work out how their websites might add value to in-store spending, the tables are now turning. What is clear from the Top Shop experience is that the physical store space must now add value to the price-led, convenience and personalisation of shopping online.

This blog post was written by Amanda Davie, Managing Director, Reform.