By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
5/20/2008
I have written and spoken a lot about “the customer buying process”: the idea that you can’t view your retail business in terms of how you sell, but in terms of how your customers want to buy from you. I use an example all the time of a 13-step process for buying a vacation home, showing all of the touch points managed by the seller (“retailer”) and those touch points that the consumer went through but were unmanaged by the seller, and so were opportunities for competitors to steal customers away. For the record, in the example, only 5 of the 13 steps were managed by the seller.
Last week I was in London attending a half-day thought leadership event put on by IBM and Sterling Commerce on multi-channel. Europe is wild about multi-channel at the moment – it was the strongest theme at the World Retail Congress by far, and our own research on multi-channel shows that European retailers are more primed to take on cross-channel/multi-channel processes than their US counterparts, even though this is a high priority for both regions.
I was there to speak about the role that stores, and technology in stores, plays in the customer experience now and in the future – the idea being that as buying becomes more multi-channel, the role of stores will change. At the event I followed Richard Exon, the CEO of RCKR/Y&R, the ad agency that was instrumental in engineering Marks & Spencer’s dramatic turnaround. Though completely fortuitous, I could not have asked for a better setup. Richard spoke about the role that the retail brand plays today, and how that is significantly different than in the past. For example, he pointed out that in the past retailers had influence over where people shopped, but it was product brands that still drove what people buy. Today, where people shop has at least as much influence over what people buy – the retail brand has more power than ever.
But then he went in a completely different direction than I expected. As an ad guy, I expected Richard to then talk about the role that advertising plays in building a brand, but he then proceeded to talk about everything BUT advertising. He pointed out that what Apple has done with Apple stores is a more powerful branding message than anything it could have accomplished through advertising – and in fact, through its retail presence has achieved something that would have only been available through an ad strategy even a decade ago.
As part of my talk, the attendees walked through the buying process that three of the participants went through recently. We sketched out what the process looked like from the customer’s perspective and then each table discussed how to improve one of the processes so that the customer would have a better experience next time. They were quite diverse – buying sandpaper to finish a weekend process, buying a new pair of glasses in an emergency to replace ones that were broken, and buying a pair of men’s shoes for work.
In the examples we developed, each process had about 5-8 touch points in it. My vacation seller example, remember, had 13 steps. To contrast, when Marks & Spencer went through a similar process as part of their rebranding effort, they identified no less than 250 touch points to their customers.
Now, to be fair, in our little exercise, we weren’t considering the role of brand on the broader scale. But it seems to me that M&S have a significant jump on the game having done it with a broader view in mind. Two-hundred fifty customer touch points, many of which occur in the store. All identified and managed against a single set of brand objectives.
How powerful would it be if you could pull off a consistent brand experience across 250 touch points: Can you say that your company is doing that today?
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