Consumer Collaboration In The Omni Market

Consumers have embraced a wide variety of tools provided by retailers, carriers of various sorts, manufacturers, search engines, GPS and shopping apps at various times and for various capabilities and even in various combinations in order to meet their lifestyle needs at the time of shopping and purchasing.  Consumer shopping requirements and practices are molded by their requirements at the time of their activities and the demands and requirements changes at the time of their shopping and even the products for which they are shopping. These various types and degrees of shopping and purchasing demands can make it very difficult for all participants to respond and even more important make it very difficult for the participants to coordinate and support across the various partners because of the number of potential partners involved and the number of combinations that can be involved.

When you stop and think about the shopping methods practiced based on the types of products, the consumer involved (man, woman and generational), the time of day, the channel, the consumer mood, special price offers and even the time of year you can see the challenge for the participants in the experience.  I know that my shopping practices and demands are different if I am shopping for groceries or shopping for apparel and my wife’s shopping practices are different from my practices and level of comfort for technology interaction at the time and type of shopping. For instance, sometimes shopping can simply be a social experience where ther purchase is spur of the moment and completely random and other times shopping is specific with specific objectives for instance groceries or gifts.

The partners across the retail omni market have the unenviable task of trying to define and support the consumer interaction and collaboration opportunities across all of these many combinations.  As you can imagine there is no possible way for partner retail participants to define and support all options, however retailers have the requirement to provide support options that allow the consumer to create their own combinations based on their requirements at the time.  I think this is the most important point related to the collaboration opportunities with consumers; provide options that can be combined by the participants at the time to meet the specific requirements at the time.

This is where the control tower concept can be incorporated to support the consumer and partner requirements at the time of the engagement.  This control tower is where the participants in the retail omni market can come together in a collaborative environment with a tool that provides the means to coordinate both capabilities and data with and across the partners.  It will be extremely beneficial and quickly become a base requirement for participants in the retail omni market to have a place and a tool that provides the framework for collection and analytics of the large amounts of data that is available in this new market capabilities and then use these analytics to develop and implement new collaborative methods and practices to support these requirements.