Retaining Millennial Consumers

Retailers must embrace and support the demands of the millennial consumers in order to maintain their success in the future.  This is an important strategy for consumers to ensure the transition and participation across generations.  Millennials and later generations are changing the practices that incorporate technology interaction in their daily lives and the retailer must stay abreast of these changes in order to first draw and then retain the interest of future generations.  This means that retailers must develop a platform and site that supports the interests and demands of millennials such as the consumer collaboration site.  The retailer must provide a portal for interests and interaction that allows for purchases.

This is an important distinction; the portal that supports interests and cross interaction between consumers and the retailer that allows purchases.  The current platform supports purchases and the consumer is then required to cobble together sites and tools that support their interests and cross interaction.  Millennials and newer generations expect expect and require these capabilities in their interaction and by offering these capabilities the retailer will increase the likelihood of retaining these consumers.  In fact, I think that retailers offering these types of services will be sought out by consumers as the word is spread.  

Word of the availability of these types of capabilities will spread quickly as consumers share and invite their friends to participate.  The key to the success in spreading the word is encouraging consumers to load contact information of their friends in the site to enhance their experience and easily share comments, suggestions and even interactively engage others in their shopping experiences.  This is a common practice now when joining many, if not most, of the the social media web sites.  This is an important tool to both engage members and also to encourage members to invite their friends and family to join.  

The objective for collecting members to the consumer shopping and collaboration site is to gain a momentum of members to increase the participation.  Consumer participation is the key to success in building the shopping and collaboration site.  The majority of members of the site will participate infrequently and especially when the site is just starting.  This is why it is so important to gain a large number of members in order to increase the volume of participation.  When the site is settled with a member base that participates the amount of participation from all of the members will increase.  

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?