Collaboration Retention

Retention of consumer collaboration partners is very important and requires a great deal of focus and continuous interaction.  Consumers are only enticed to participate based on content and self interest and they do not continue to engage unless the level of interest continues and the interaction and opportunities are continuously refreshed.  It is important to retain consumers in this relationship in order to build the customer base and also to develop a relationship.  Social commerce is all about relationships and regular interaction between the retailer and the consumer and since there is no contract to ensure the consumers continue to engage in the relationship it is up to the retailer to continuously find reasons for the consumer to return and engage.  This requires continuous refreshment and also communications with the consumers to inform of new features and opportunities to participate and shop.

The engagement is about interest and encouraging the consumer to return to the retailer and then once there the interest must remain high for the consumer to remain on the site.  Therefore, the goal of the retailer is the return of the customer and retention with the retailer because the longer the consumer remains in the store or on the web site the higher the likelihood the consumer will purchase.  Consumers can be encouraged to return to the stores and the web sites by an interest or a need, then once there the consumer can be encouraged to stay and shop with a hope of the consumer making opportunistic purchases.  

Retailers are attempting to attract consumers not just for one or two purchase but for a lifetime of purchases.  The Internet and eCommerce has fundamentally changed the concept and demands to develop a lifetime customer when the consumer used these platforms to wrest control of their shopping and purchasing practices to meet their changing lifestyles.  To a very large extent retailers created this new practice by a single minded focus on low price.  This focus has changed the consumer perspective and they have used the Internet to the detriment of the retailer because the Internet allows consumers to shop at their own discretion and encourages consumers to jump from site to site in their search.

Retailers now must change their focus from a one dimensional price focus to a focus on engaging the consumer and providing a virtual shopping environment where the consumer will stay and interact with other shoppers and their friends and family.  This new focus is very much on collaboration in order to retain the shopper.  The challenge for retailers now though is related to technology, skills and focus on interaction. The retail industry in general is not based on leading edge technology so there is an investment required in both technology and skills to build the technology capabilities.  Then these same retailers must increase their focus on engaging with the consumers to collaborate on defining and then meeting consumer demands.  These hurdles are extremely difficult to meet however the reward is the long term success of their business.

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?

Collaboration Support

Collaboration requires a great deal of support and effort and most importantly encouragement in order to be successful and consumer collaboration requires and even greater amount of these three ingrediants because the consumer must be re-engaged every day in order to maintain a usable and value add level of collaboration.  Collaboration requires a level of engagement in order to deliver value to all partners and this level of engagement can only be encouraged for consumers.  Consumers must be interested and encouraged to maintain the level of engagement and this can be very difficult because there are many things vying for consumer attention in their life and frankly collaboration with retailers is not very high on that list of activities.  For this reason retailers must maintain a large number of channels and also a continuous stream of communication with the consumer.  

This stream of consumer communication must be value add as well and it must be something other than a steady stream of discounts and sales.  The communication must provide hints and suggestions on product usage and also must include phrases and opportunities for consumers to reply and provide their own suggestions for usage.  This is where the social networks come into play to support a broad spectrum of response and usage on an open platform that encourages participation and engagement.  Retailers are not required and they absolutely should not develop their own social networks, instead they should participate and engage on the existing social networks.  The social networks provide a means and a ready audience to communicate and collaborate with consumers and develop a community.

The next areas of communication and participation is related to mobile apps and mobile location based shopping services that will reach out and engage consumers based on their location and proximity to stores and malls.  This provides another means to nudge and engage the consumer to collaborate and encourage consumers to participate and shop.  These tools provide a means to simplify the shopping and purchasing experience and an opportunity for the retailer to leave a positive impression and encourage participation and collaboration.  The retailer must engage the consumer at every opportunity and the mobile technology and wireless networks provide another means of communicating and engaging by encouraging interaction.  

All of these methods of engagement require a solid technology framework and control tower framework capability to capture and collate data for consumer engagement.  This requires acceptance that the collaborative engagement will never be ‘completed’ and that it will always require a high level of involvement to encourage active and continuous participation from consumers.  This will most of all require a high level of support and encouragement from leadership to ensure the continued engagement and growth of participation.

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?

Collaboration Coordination

Collaboration does not just happen, it requires commitment and coordination to be effective and delivery benefits to the collaboration partners.  This is especially true in developing a collaborative partnership with consumers due to the need to maintain interest and encourage the consumers to continue the relationship.  A collaobrative partnership between professionals and companies is defined and measured via a formal agreement, however consumers do not and will not enter into a professional agreement to collaborate with retailers.  Retailers must grow a relationship with consumers to encourage collaboration and this relationship must continuously provide reasons and encouragement for consumers to participate in the collaborative relationship.  This effort requires coordination and planning to be effective.

Collaboration coordination requires careful planning along with a mechanism to collect and then implement changes based on feedback mechanisms.  This all requires commitment from senior leadership and also a mechanism to store, track and measure the results of the feedback.  The strength of the collaborative partnership cannot be maintained extended through haphazard activities, it requires a great deal of information, planning and coordination to be successful.  This requires a tool to collect data and support analysis of the data so that the feedback can be used to identify and direct new methods for shopping and purchasing.

This tool provides a control tower concept to support and coordinate and improve collaboration opportunities. Collaboration continuous improvement must be a focus and the control tower tool provides methods to measure and evaluate improvements to increase the collaboration level and in turn support new shopping and purchasing demands of consumers.  This continuous improvement focus provides a method for retailers to collect feedback from consumers to feed back into the improvement process.  The control tower provides the means to store and analyze the information.

Consumers are fickle and have short attention spans and this requires a continuous level of attention in order to maintain interest in the consumer.  This requires a greater level of focus and, in addition, a greater level of information to ensure greater attention is focused on the topics and that are important to consumers.  This level of detail must be stored for access and research and this belongs in a control framework that collects and supports relational analysis.  

Retailers will do well to focus on developing two relational frameworks, the first to collect and store data to allow for big data relational analysis and the second to support quick integration of new apps for support of consumer demands.  I do not think retailers can be successful without both of these frameworks and capabilities.  Then the focus and the work for retailers is can be the collaborative relationship with consumers that will remain fresh and interesting for consumers.  

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?

Experimentation Culture

Retailers must develop and embrace a culture that supports and encourages experimentation.  This can start with a focus on consumer relationship experimentation, although I firmly believe this will quickly expand throughout the enterprise as the realization of the scope and breadth gains understanding.  I focus on a culture change here because it must be embraced by the senior leadership in order to succeed across the organization.  Individual initiatives will result from this culture change to support and develop the capabilities.  The senior leadership though must focus on the strategic direction to change the culture and encourage experimentation throughout the organization.  This will be difficult to maintain a focus especially while the retailer is navigating through a great deal of disrupting changes.  I believe this is the only way though to successfully navigate the changes and disruption.

This experimentation culture is not a new phenomenon, it has been embraced and expanding in the consumer market and especially in the technology market for years.  It has now reached a level though in the retail marketplace that it cannot be ignored.  General retailers and especially the large retailers have never chased bleeding edge technology however I am not speaking of bleeding edge technology in this place either.  I believe this can quickly be addressed through an expansion continuous improvement that focuses on consumer collaboration and demands.  The retailer viewpoint and support must be changed from large project implementation to a smaller cyclical cycle of improvements.  When viewed this way it should sit very well with the retail senior leadership.

The challenge however will be with the implementation of a control tower type of technology that allows functionality experimentation in addition to a change in culture to reach out and collaboration with consumers.  This cannot be implemented in a controlled manner without a control tower technology to route and monitor, the changes are coming too quickly and are frankly disruptive to a legacy type of technology framework and process and methodology framework.  The control tower supports change in a manner that is efficient and allows for experimentation quickly and efficiently.  

There are many suppliers and practices in the market that can help with the technology aspect of a control tower implementation.  There are also many service providers that are capable of helping to implement a strategy of experimentation and collaboration.  The key ingredient to this challenge is the desire and commitment of senior leadership to support and drive these changes into their organization.  Unfortunately it is too easy to go along with the legacy process and procedures, it is always easier to stay the course.  However we are seeing that the retailers late to the table or still fighting change are the retailers that are struggling the most to survive in this new marketplace.

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?

Consumer Experimentation

The growth of the Internet along with high speed network capabilities brought a time of experimentation and expansion into new tools and capabilities.  The growth and expansion of wireless and mobile technology quickened expanded the experimentation and quickened the change process.  Consumers are now probably the greatest segment of experimenters in the marketplace.  With the expansion of millennial generation in the marketplace this pace of experimentation and change has only quickened.  One of the key driving factors for this increase in experimentation and change is the social networks and the play store.  The social network along with the expansion of focused ads in the web has increased the visibility of new tools and capabilities that have drawn interest and increased consumer experimentation to incorporate new tools into their online experience.

Consumers embraced these new opportunities to bring about a new explosion of experimentation to determine how to use the new tools and social networks together.  The growth in millennials in the the marketplace sealed these practices and really pushed the market disruption into overdrive.  This experimentation has caught the omni-channel retailer by surprise and this disruption has impacted their business model in ways that they have not come to understand yet.  Consumers have taken control of their shopping and purchasing and this is the key reason for the disruption in the marketplace.  The major retailers are no longer in control of the marketplace and can no longer dictate how and when consumers purchase and shop.

Experimentation is not new in the retail marketplace, what is new though is the level and types of experimentation possible through eCommerce, and the expanded availability and capabilities of technology tools that consumers use to shop.  Consumer experimentation and the technology tools and capabilities have reached a critical mass and now consumers are mashing tools in ways that the creaters of the tools did not imagine.  This experimentation leads to a dramatic and discontinuous increase of change in the retail marketplace.  Retailers must stop fighting and must embrace the changes in the marketplace to survive.  This means that retailers must change their culture from a relatively closed, command and control culture, to a more open and collaborative culture.  This collaborative culture must embrace consumers to open the communications and create a shared experimentation method that encourages participation from retailers and consumers to develop new methods to support the consumer demands.

I think that Amazon’s greatest practice and belief is the power of experimentation.  Amazon encourages experimentation and does not fear failure, don’t get me wrong I understand that continuous failure is not a successful strategy, however fear of failure is also not a successful strategy.  The draw of consumers to Amazon is not only the price and the ease of purchase it is to a large extent the Amazon belief and practice of experimentation.  These practices have encouraged new customers to try the retailer and have also created new market opportunities and even markets.   

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?

Social Commerce Trend Leaders

In order to be successful in this new retail marketplace retailers must work to become social commerce trend leaders.  Social commerce trends are continuously changing and adjusting as consumers change and adjust their practices and shopping and purchasing methods this means that retailers in turn must adjust and change in order to meet the changing consumer demands.  Retailers have two methods to meet these changes; either through chasing the changes or guiding the changes through collaboration with consumers.  In any course, the consumer has already taken control of their shopping and purchasing practices by embracing the practice of experimentation and integration of tools and capabilities available via the web and mobile apps.

Retailers have no choice now but to change their only decision is the method for change.  Do retailers change in a reactionary manner based on consumer tools or do retailers change based on consumer collaboration.  No matter the course chosen by the retailer, they will be changing and these changes will surely disrupt the way they do business.  In my opinion, the best option that provides the greatest long term value and supportability to the retailer.  The direction seems straightforward and that leaves the decision and the strategic plan to the retailer.  

I see that the strategic direction that seems to have been chosen by at least some of the large retailers is a reactionary strategy that is based on acquisition of tools that allow the retailer to support current consumer demands.  What I do not see though is changes to the retailer culture to collaborate with consumers in developing new practices.  This will become the defining factor in the long term success of these retailers.  It will be difficult for the retailer to chase the trends and capabilities because the velocity of these changes is increasing.  These changing trends of consumers are based on trial and error of tools and especially mobile apps that are not in the control of retailers and cannot be planned by the retailers.

These changes require active interaction with consumers to understand the reasons and the direction for their experimentation.  This is the essence of social commerce trend leaders; the practice of experimentation based on collaboration with consumers.  This is really the next development in focus groups that have always tried to understand consumer demands.  In this new world though the focus group is replaced by collaborative practices with the consumer to collaboratively develop new methods and practices for shopping.  I see Amazon moving in this direction through their interactive base of consumer communications and data analysis coupled with their penchant for experimentation with new tools and technology.  If legacy retailers to not change and embrace this method of experimentation and collaboration with consumers they will be delegated to remain followers that spend large amounts of time and money chasing trends that are past their prime.

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?

Collaboration Trial And Error

Trial and error is a key factor in developing a collaborative relationships and especially in developing that relationship between consumer and retailer.  Consumers are a fickle group with a short attention span and this drives a level and velocity of change in interaction that is breathtaking and also extremely intimidating for the retailer.  Many of the larger retailers are struggling with the concept and as a result are attempting to buy into the consumer collaboration through acquisition of tools.  While it is important to use the appropriate tools in collaborative efforts it is also probably more important to use and interact with the tools to engage the consumer and this is the part that requires active participation by the retailer.  The difficulty is that there is no guidebook on what works for consumers so there is a great deal of trial and error involved in the process that can make the retailer uneasy.

The majority of retailers and especially the larger retailers are not known for their experimentation in new technologies or retail practices.  These retailers are followers that wait for the leaders to vet new technologies and practices before embracing and implementing themselves.  This practice has been very productive for retailers in the past and this practice is also driving the current strategy for the larger retailers in acquisition of new technologies and tools.  In other words, these large retailers are embracing the new technology through acquisition after this technology has been vetted by the marketplace.  This strategy is a very good way to bootstrap their capabilities to meet the demands of the marketplace.  However, without a paired new human practice to collaborate with consumers and experiment through trial and error these technology capabilities will only allow these retailers to remain two steps behind demands of the marketplace.

Retailers must pair the technology capabilities with human practices to collaboration and engage consumers direction in order to discover and implement new practices to support consumer demands.  This pairing requires a long term commitment to change their culture to interact and collaborate with with consumers along and with this a commitment to encourage experimentation and an acceptance for these experiments to fail.  This requires a long term commitment from leadership to accept and even encourage failure in experimentation supporting consumer demands.

These large retailers must change their practices from trend followers to trend leaders in order to survive in the marketplace.  The velocity of change driven by consumer curiosity and experimentation will not allow for retailers to wait for practices and methods to become engrained in the marketplace because the new velocity of change does not generally support standard practices very well.  The new standard practice is change and this change requires a method of trial and error to experiment with the changing consumer demands.  This is the driving factor of the market disruption and retailers must embrace and change in order to survive.  

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?

Consumer Collaboration Challenges

Consumer collaboration is developed by overcoming one challenge after another thrown up by consumers simply in the general dealings and not due to some plan by consumers.  Consumer collaboration is successful when the retailer continuously generates new activities, functions or opportunities for interactions by the consumer and not because of the retailer’s reputation or product.  Remember that consumers can find and purchase the product anywhere, the goal of the social commerce retailer is to generate the interest and relationship with consumers to lure them to return and remain on the retailer’s site and purchase the product.  Consumer collaboration is the new marketing medium to encourage customer engagement and retention and this is especially challenging because of the short attention span that consumers are developing in the eCommerce world.

The challenge then for retailers is how do they continuously monitor and adjust to the changing demands of consumers?  This is not as simple as acquisition and incorporation of new online tools.  Acquisition and implementation of tools helps the retailer by providing new capabilities and this is all good however there must be a change in the process and procedures to maximize the potential of tools.  This is really the key challenge for retailers to change the culture to maximize tools and collaboration with the consumer.  

Historically retailers and even other businesses within the supply chain have been able to adjust to market changes through acquisition of new tools.  Many times these new tools have driven and required changes to the business processes and procedures in order to bring value.  ERP software is a good example of this experience where the tool drives an evaluation and revision of the business processes and procedures.  This social commerce trend though is different than an ERP implementation because the trend is based on change and the manner in which consumers accept and utilize social networks and eCommerce tools.  This trend is a discovery and embrace of capabilities and power by consumers and as such it is driven by the consumer discovery and imagination incorporating these tools.

The challenge for retailers then is a cultural change that started with the rise and incorporation Facebook by consumers and retailers.  This cultural change requires human interaction and research in order to understand and react to these consumer changes.  This cultural change is moving against previous retailer trends to automate and remove people from the process in order to standardize and reduce costs.  This cultural change cannot be implemented only by implementation of tools, this requires a very coordinated effort to evaluate, experiment and then monitor the results and start the process again, in other words this requires a robust continuous improvement process to understand and react to the changing consumer demands.

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?

Consumer Collaboration Development

Consumer collaborative activities and practices must be developed and while the first step is a flexible and robust collaboration program that is just the beginning of the story.  Collaboration with consumers must be nurtured and developed overtime because the consumer has no obligation to the retailer to participate.  The retailer must perform the heavy lifting of developing and then maintaining a collaboration program with consumers that continuously grows and changes as the consumer interaction and collaboration dictates.  In a similar manner the collaborative partnership between consumer and retailer must be developed and nurtured in order to not just maintain but most importantly to develop a collaborative relationship that encourages and rewards participation by the consumer.  

Consumers will participate if specifically requested as shown by the continued growth and abundance of surveys.  There seem to be surveys for every type of consumer interaction now and these surveys are bombarding the consumer to request feedback for every part of the consumer interaction.  There are other types of collaboration and interaction as well that have been developing and expanding over time such as customer reviews, FAQ listings and a type of product specific FAQ where the customer is encouraged to provide feedback to other customer questions.  While each of these offer a means to provide additional feedback for the questions, each of these interactions are specifically focused on a set of questions and a specific topic.  There is no freeform interaction between consumer and retailer and this freeform interaction is the secret sauce of collaboration that provides the spark for the interest to return.  

All of the social networks provide an open forum for members and contacts to respond to postings in a freeform manner that develops a conversation.  The retailer must provide this type of forum that encourages development of collaborative interactions and interactive discussions between other customers and the retailer.  This forum will develop the collaborative practices that will encourage customers to return to participate.  The retailers can then mine these interactions to develop new collaborative programs and interactions to expand the interactions and encourage increased participation.  

The collaboration program is the foundation, or framework, in which the retailer will develop collaborative consumer relationships.  The effort still lies in the actual development and maintenance of these relationships.  This is where the effort for the retailer must be focused and along with the effort the retailer must also apply a great deal of patience and determination in order to nurture and develop the collaborative relationship.  This relationship is fragile at first and must be nurtured until the consumer participation level reaches a critical mass of participation.  However the retailer can never put the collaboration development on ‘auto pilot’ the retailer must always monitor the forums to ensure they remain a safe and secure environment.

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?

Consumer Collaboration Programs

Consumer collaboration programs are necessary for the retailer to effectively achieve value from collaborative consumer interactions.  This allows the retailer to plan and coordinate both the interactions and the touch points of the relationships with the consumer.  It is important that collaboration programs are planned and coordinated then to allow for the interaction to come across as free wheeling and at the same time be prepared and then the retailers can direct the interactions in a manner that delivers value to both the consumer and the retailer.  These programs help the retailer to come across as professional and guide the types of interactions in a manner that allows for a professional and value added experience.  This experience is the key to the retention of consumers and reaction and delivery of the changing consumer demands.

In order to encourage interaction, collaboration must allow for and come across as a bit of a free wheeling interactions in order to deliver and develop the interactive relationship with between the consumer and the retailer.  It is important for the collaboration interactions to come across as fresh and immediate in order to encourage the consumer to participate.  It is also important for the collaborative programs to be flexible and reactive to the consumer interactions to encourage them and help them to feel they are participating and guiding the program in order to encourage a commitment and retain the consumer’s interest.  

It is important to understand that the most free wheeling type of relationship is based on well planned and carefully coordinated programs and activities.  The retailer must be prepared for every contingency in order to quickly react and adjust the program to the consumer.  This is very difficult and requires a great deal of attention and focus for the program to come across as customized for the individual consumer and yet be able to support almost any consumer.  Remember the objective of the collaborative programs is to encourage two way communications between retailer and consumer so the retailer develops an outlet for learning and reacting to consumer demands.  This means that the program must be flexible to feel individualized and yet planned to support the widest level of interactions with the widest array of consumers.  

Collaboration programs with consumers are very difficult because of the very nature of the consumer interaction and relationships with the retailer.  Professional collaborative programs across and between retail supply chain partners are simple to understand and define because there are clear objectives and points of collaboration that can be defined to bring value to the relationship.  The consumer collaboration program however is a bit of a fishing expedition where the retailer explores what they believe are opportunities for consumer collaboration in order to identify and then develop the points that interest consumers.  This is the key and at the same time the greatest challenge; to cast a wide net that hooks the greatest number of consumers into a relationship that delivers value to all of the participants.

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?

Consumer Collaboration Framework

Retailers must now  split their focus between building a true omni-channel sales framework and building and supporting a consumer collaborative framework in order to develop a relationship that will help retailers to maintain and grow their place in the market.  The legacy large retailers must provide a more cohesive and fluid shopping and purchasing experience across platforms in order to support consumers demands to meet their lifestyle needs in order to stabilize their place in the marketplace.  At the same time these retailers must build this consumer collaborative framework to develop a relationship that will provide the retailers with early input of consumer trends and changing demands in order to prepare and meet these changing demands in the future.  

Consumers will provide their opinions and suggestion regarding their needs and desires, however they must be given the opportunity to provide these opinions.  This requires, though, a method to develop a two way conversation between consumers and retailers.  This is different than the retailer’s standard practice of focus groups, surveys and focus groups and sales tracking.  All of the existing methods provide an after the fact type of measurement that may confirm direction however they provide no early warning or strategic guidance for directional changes.  This directional guidance is important especially now because of the turmoil of the retail marketplace and all of the forces driving change into this marketplace.

Consumer direct interaction and their opinions must be used to drive change and improvements into the marketplace.  The importance of two way interaction cannot be over estimated by retailers and must be integrated as a driving factor in their strategic direction determinations.  The growth and acceptance of the social commerce marketplace requires this consumer collaborative framework to provide guidance and develop the partnership with consumers that will support the social commerce marketplace.

I am not sure where this partnership will drive the marketplace however I am sure that without this consumer collaborative partnership there will be a greater instance of retail failures.  The marketplace is changing extremely quickly, a phrase that I think provides a great description is - change at the speed of life.  The rate and the impact of the changes is increasing and this increased rate of change requires the retailers to implement new methods to ingest the changes into the marketplace.  Retailers can no longer afford to wait for someone to discover the method to address the changing demands, they must develop a collaborative partnership with consumers in order to work through the changes directly with consumers through a trial and error practice.

The only thing that retailers can count on now is change and there are many forces driving this change, both internal and external to the retailer.  This means they must change their methods to identify and incorporate the consumer demands to meet the speed of change.  The only method that can support the amount and rate of change is a collaborative practice to work with consumers.

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?

Collaborative Marketplace

 

Social commerce, in my opinion, is built on a collaborative marketplace framework of technology, social networks and most importantly a collaborative viewpoint and practices by the consumer to provide the fuel to make social commerce a disruptive force in the retail marketplace.  Without the collaborative framework supported by consumers using the technology and social networks social commerce would simply be viewed as another retail channel.  However, the consumer embrace of the technology and social network tools at their disposal in a collaborative framework have changed the retail marketplace in ways that are still being discovered.  Leadership of the large legacy retailers have recognized the significance of social commerce in the retail marketplace and now must also recognize the importance of collaboration in the marketplace with all partners.  

Collaboration is the fuel that drives the advancement of changes and the redefinition of shopping and purchasing that is fueling the turmoil in the marketplace.  There is no other way to view the impact to the marketplace and retailers are struggling now to re-align their practices with the new technology through acquisition of eCommerce technology.  Retailers though must also focus and develop collaborative practices with consumers to plug into the future changes and potential of social commerce.

Most retailers to date have only seemed to focus on the operational aspects of social commerce and have lagged in the social aspect and the relationship with the consumer.  Many retailers, and especially what I have been referring to as the large legacy retailers, have only focused on the eCommerce sales capabilities along with the lowest price strategy.  This is only a short term strategy that in the end will hamper the abilities of the retailers to survive as the social marketplace expands.  

Consumers want to interact directly with retailers, whether with sales clerks directly, or through social network interactions, to guide and support the consumer lifestyle and a collaborative framework based on social networks provides the basis for this improved relationship.  Consumers have used the tools at their disposal to develop a collaborative shopping and purchasing environment that supports their changing lifestyle.  The legacy retailers to-date have been focused on following trends though instead of getting ahead of the curve and a collaborative framework that includes consumers will provide the tools and information to allow retailers to achieve this capability.

Superb operational execution is extremely important in this environment and must be a focus of the retailers in order to succeed.  This is though not the only thing that is critical to success and retailers must also focus on the consumer collaborative framework in order to develop a relationship that will help retailers to maintain and grow their place in the market.  Consumers will provide their opinions and suggestion however they must be giving the opportunity to provide these opinions and then these opinions must be used to drive change and improvements into the marketplace.

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?

Social Commerce Consumers

 

Social commerce has been expanding for some time now and has reached the tipping point to disrupt the retail marketplace now in a manner that is extremely difficult for many retailers to address.  This disruption is different than the initial Internet boom and bust because of its pervasiveness across consumer groups and probably most importantly because of the growth of younger generations in the retail marketplace.  The initial boom was feed by a combination of potential and hype and did not expand past the initial hype because the technology could not support the consumer demands.  Now the technology capabilities have finally reached the level where they can at least begin to meet consumer demands and this has caused the disruption.  This disruption is based on a broad acceptance across all consumer groups of the technology and the ability to reshape the marketplace to meet their lifestyles.

The current disruption is based on consumers that are more comfortable with technology and technology that  is pervasive in their lives.  This is important to understand because this points to long term changes and trends that will continue to change the marketplace.  Seeing as how these changes have disrupted the marketplace and the fact that this trend is not slowing it is extremely important for retailers to adjust their internal practices to make their capabilities more flexible.  This means retailers must implement a technology framework that supports flexibility and provides a robust base to support the changing consumer shopping and purchasing practices.

Even more important than the technology platform is changes to business processes.  These changes must be implemented and encouraged to expand within the business in order to understand and identify early changes to consumer practices in order to incorporate into the retail marketplace.  This is the most difficult task for retailers now and is absolutely the greatest challenge for these retailers.  

Retailers can easily purchase new technology and in fact this practice is increasing and quickly expanding for the large retailers such as Wal Mart.  These technologies are only one piece of the puzzle and in order to remain successful in the changing marketplace these retailers must change their practices as a first priority.  Unfortunately this is also the most difficult change to make for retailers because it requires a concerted and long term effort from the top of the organization to the bottom.  This is not a once-and-done process and requires implementing and encouraging a business process change in order to support the long term requirements of the business.

Remember that large online retailers are also continuously changing and they are already ahead of the curve in cultural and business processes to support the online marketplace. Make no mistake, these capabilities are a definite advantage and allows them to identify and mold marketplace changes to their advantage.  This is a huge advantage for these retailers and must not be taken lightly by the large legacy retailers in their actions to adjust to the new reality.

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?

Social Commerce Continuity

It seems to me that social commerce can be viewed to a large extent as a type of business disruption based on the impact to the retail marketplace.  Taking this view as a base then retailers may react in a different manner to analyze, adjust to the events and then put into place plans and procedures to allow an early identification and reaction to the changes that are being driven by consumers to create these events.  Many of these events truly are business disrupting and threatening to the manner in which these retailers deliver services and products.  Viewing the social commerce changes and the rate of these changes as a business continuity exercise and the changes demanded by the consumers as disrupting events will encourage the retailers to place an appropriate level of importance and more important, urgency in their reactions to address these changes.

It is clear that the status quo has been turned on its ear and the level and rate of change is not subsiding.  Just like any other type of business disruption the changes and rate of these changes is disrupting the long standing practices of retailers and must be addressed as a fundamental change in the business environment.  Viewing these changes as a business continuity exercise will help retailers to not only react to the current challenges but it will also help them to put into place sense and respond practices to understand and react to the changes demanded by consumers and the marketplace.  The learning moment here is the importance of a sense and respond practices that will allow retailers to react to the changes through a set of flexible practices rather than strict hierarchical practices.

Sense and respond practices are critical to the success going forward for the retail marketplace because of the velocity of change now being driven into the marketplace.  As the consumer make-up shifts to a younger and more technology savvy consumer these changes will only increase.  This is why it is so important for retailers to put into place guidelines to sense and respond.  These guidelines provide principles that allow decisions to be made at a lower level and much more quickly.

This also requires a shift in technology to embrace the social network and eCommerce marketing, shopping and purchasing tools.  In addition, and probably most importantly, it requires a shift to engage consumers to collaborate and help with the reaction to the changes in the marketplace.  These types of changes require a robust and flexible technology framework and platform to be able to react to the changes and quickly shift and support changes in shopping and purchasing.  The importance of the technology is increasing quickly now because of the shift in consumers to a more technology based shopping and purchasing practice.

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?

Retail Resilience

Retailers must increase their resilience and ability to quickly react to changing demands in the marketplace in order to survive.  This is especially important because of the increased demand on technology to support shopping and purchasing via the Internet.  Any extended loss of connectivity to the Internet and especially during peak and holiday seasons can be disastrous for the retailer's bottom line.  Resilience in the retailers interaction with consumers is important for the same reason; consumers can quickly and unexpectedly change practices, tools and technology that can leave retailers struggling in their ability to respond and and adjust to the changes.  Probably the best example of a lack of resilience is the delayed reaction and inability of retailers to react to the growing shift of consumers from brick and mortar purchasing to eCommerce.

The delayed and uneven reaction to the change in consumer purchasing practices by the large legacy retailers especially is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.  I know that it is easy now to look back and see the signs of the changes however these signs and the consumer’s shopping patterns have been shifting for years now and retailers still seem to have been caught by surprise.  This is a great example of lack of resilience added to a lack of research and refusal to learn.  This is truly the most surprising aspect of the current changes in shopping and purchasing and the resulting impact on the retail marketplace and lack of preparation by retailers.  

I have experienced the beginning of the Internet revolution and the growth and expansion over the years and I find this struggle to react to the current changes perplexing.  Retailers may have been initially caught by surprise by the early growth of eCommerce sales during the peak and holiday seasons but they quickly reacted to resolve performance and capacity issues. This is what I refer to when I speak of resilience, a preparation and ability to react to and overcome issues that pop up.  Resilience is required in connectivity to the Internet, hardware and software and database failover and recovery and retailers have prepared for these types of failures.  Retailers must also include changes to consumer purchasing and shopping practices in their business continuity and resilience planning.  

Businesses plan for many different kinds of natural and technology events that can interrupt their services and capabilities and now they need to include consumer demands and changes in these analyses and plans.  Retailers continuously plan and forecast consumer reactions to new products and now they must include in these plans consumer reactions to new services, shopping and purchasing capabilities.  It is clear that retailers must include a futurist team that is responsible for ‘what if’ scenarios to understand and prepare for potential consumer changes in shopping and purchasing practices.  

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?