Brands may be missing online opportunities(69569)

Note to Brands: Stop Ignoring Online Shoppers

Ever walk into the high-energy atmosphere of a Niketown or the chic, glass-and-aluminum sanctum of an Apple Store? As you enter these retail spaces, chances are you feel an immediate bond with the brand. If so, it s no accident. What you re really walking into, of course, is a world of all things Nike or a space designed to be a complete brand experience of Apple.

Now, what happens when you walk into the Best Buy or Foot Locker store? You re faced with a dizzying landscape of brands and choices of competitive products, all of them vying for your attention and your business. It s a setting where the product brand takes a back seat to the retail brand.

Shrewdly, brands like Nike, Apple and a good many others dictate their customers shopping experience in the brick-and-mortar world through branded commerce. It s too bad that when it comes to the online world, few brands manage to do the same thing.

Web-based shopping is, in many ways, analogous to the in-store shopping experience. Too often, products and services sold through an e-tailer or online store see their brands diluted by the online retailer. The brands remain one step removed from the shopper. A brand has no chance to showcase its entire product line, let alone upsell or cross-sell its related items.

Much like in the brick-and-mortar world, e-tailers can feel (to use the industry parlance) brand-agnostic. For instance, when Mr. Shopper visits Amazon.com intending to buy a Samsung TV, the e-tailer will helpfully show him related items like a DVD player or surround-sound system ones made by Panasonic or Sony.

It s hard to see how the Samsung people would be happy about that.

Which is why it s time for brands to bring the commerce experience into their on- line ecosystems.

How? Companies like Procter & Gamble and Columbia Sportswear are taking the first small steps in this direction by choosing to become e-tailers in their own right, even as they continue to sell their goods and services through their traditional retail partners. They re linking to products on retail-partner sites, sharing transaction or revenue, and redirecting customers based on product availability.

Whatever the tactic, these companies are gaining a first-mover advantage in a rapidly growing trend in online retail. Product brands are wresting control of their customers online shopping experience away from the retailers.

Two key developments are motivating this trend. First, there s a realization of missed merchandising opportunities such as cross-sell and upsell, plus a desire to grab control of brands on the Web. Second, brands are witnessing technology advancements that are driving down the e-commerce barriers, making it easy for brand marketers to introduce commerce into its larger brand experience.

Internet shopping has defied much of the global recession and is still posting double-digit growth. Today, more than half of all Internet users regularly make purchases online. The figure is even higher for buyers of luxury goods. According to Forrester, shoppers for high-end items are veteran cross-channel shoppers and spend nearly double the amount of time using the Web as mainstream shoppers do.

These consumers aren t just brand-conscious; they ll think nothing of spending thousands of dollars online. It s even more important for brands seeking the attention of this savvy population to control their online presence and offer their products and services from that same engaging presence.

What s more, today a brand can manage e-commerce just as well as an online retailer can. New technologies makes it faster and quicker for companies to be able to engage visitors, manage the transaction processes, incorporate social tools such as blogs, ratings and product reviews all to deliver a more engaging online experience overall.

Recent research from Nielsen tells us that if they have a good experience purchasing online, 60 percent of buyers will return to shop for more. That good experience includes the ability to access user-generated reviews and ratings. (A third of consumers strongly prefer Web sites that feature such reviews, according to Marketing Sherpa.)

Brands that fuse the power of social media with e-commerce are ones that achieve an especially powerful level of brand engagement and in much the same way a single, branded, brick-and-mortar experience has already taught us. Since we know that every chance to personally interact with a brand can influence a decision to buy, the link between social media and online commerce is perhaps obvious. Consumers want information about the goods and services they buy and peer referral enhances that knowledge significantly.

Retail partners understand commerce, but brand marketers see commerce in context. An e-commerce platform, combined with content management supporting rich media and social software to engage in two-way communication, makes it easy for small or midsized brands to achieve what only the big players could pull off in the past.

Technology is the difference. Marketers are taking control of their customers online experience, and commerce is the final piece of the online brand experience puzzle. When your customers think of your presence online, they should instinctively think commerce and community, not just content.

Brands may be missing online opportunities

Related News

Photos

trade

market

finance