Consumer Collaboration Data

When the collaborative consumer community is ‘self sustaining’ by the participation of the consumer and interaction with the retailer the community will produce a vast amount of data.  This data will be invaluable to the retailer for developing marketing plans and especially for product development and sales forecasting.  This data will provide a wealth of information from both direct consumer response and especially by tracking movement through the site.  The challenge for the retailer will be the analysis of this data utilizing big data technology and techniques.  This data will feed a great deal of analysis scenarios to help the retailer to plan and execute product and marketing strategies and reduce the trial and error guesswork.

This consumer community will provide a great deal of information as a result of the consumer activity and travels through the community.  This information includes the path the consumer takes through the community by tracking the clicks on the page and when, and how, they leave the page.  This type of information can be invaluable in developing and formatting a community that retains the consumer and directs the consumer deeper into the community site to participate.  This hard data of the consumer path through the links and the pages on the site provides a level of confirmation and accuracy that can never be achieved through post purchase surveys.  These actual travel paths and selection of links that are interesting to the consumer, along with the sequence in which they select and explore the links will help the retailer to increase the appeal and retention of consumers in the community.

In addition, the consumer community will provide the opportunity for the retailer to perform early testing of products and marketing in a supportive environment before investing large sums of money manufacturing products.  Another opportunity for value from the community is encouraging ‘pins’ of different uses and combinations of products from the consumers.  This provides two value streams;

1. It provides suggestions to consumers for different uses for the product and different combinations of the product.  The combination, or pairing, of products provides an additional strong sales and marketing opportunity for the retailer for add-on product sales.  This is especially valuable when the suggestions are provided by other consumers.
2. It encourages both retention and return of the consumer to the site to participate.  This increases the ‘sticky’ factor of the site providing a greater potential for sales.  The more time a consumer is on the site, the higher the likelihood of a purchase.  In addition, this feature provides a great potential for word-of-mouth marketing to encourage additional consumers to investigate the site.

These provide a highly valuable potential for return from the consumer community that requires an investment in both time to develop the following and tools to analyze the vast amount of data produced by the consumer activities on the community.  This provides the retailer an environment to experiment and validate actual results rather than focus groups or surveys.  I believe the results provided by consumers exploring the community provides a greater level of accuracy than either focus groups or surveys can ever achieve and this is why I so strongly believe in the consumer community.

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 As The Next Social Wave

Consumer collaboration from the retailer perspective should be viewed as the next social networking wave.  What I mean by this is that consumer collaboration is the next logical step in the retailer to consumer relationship and engagement that started with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and Yelp and then expanded with services such as Groupon and Retail Me Not.  The initial social networks and social exchange between consumer and retailer was very one-sided, sure consumers could respond through the social networks but the interaction with the consumer was in a more outward direction from the retailer to the consumer.  Consumer collaboration practices focus on reversing that direction and encouraging the consumer to actively participate and even guide the interaction between consumer and retailer.

I bring up this social networking aspect of consumer collaboration to highlight and reference the importance of patience and long term support for the initiative.  Social networking in the retail space requires a great deal of support from internal departments and staff in order to be successful and bring value to the retailer.  The consumer collaboration extension is no different and will also require a great deal of support from these same internal departments and additional staff in order to be successful.  The retailer must realize this is no small investment and also, even more importantly, no short term investment with a quick return on investment.  The retailer must be prepared for a long term investment in consumer collaboration in order to reap the benefits.

I strongly believe though that all of this effort and patience will create a stronger relationship and increased retention of the customers.  In addition, I think that there is a major difference between the consumer collaboration initiative and the earlier social networking activities in that consumer collaboration has the very strong potential to reduce the retailer labor support requirements as the community strengthens.  The main objective of the consumer collaboration community is to develop a community that will open communication and engagement between the retailer and the consumer.  This community is meant to provide a place for consumers to provide feedback and suggestions to other consumers along with the retailer.  Based on this key objective, the community can be considered a success when the consumer community members begin supporting and driving the activities themselves.

The most valuable benefits from the consumer community will be derived by the interaction of the consumer members with other consumers and the retailer.  This interaction of consumers will provide the retailer with a great wealth of data and suggestions on product development, and groupings along with methods and data on marketing and sales of the products.  These are the benefits that will drive value and growth for the retailer.  

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?

Patience In Collaboration

In this fast paced world of eCommerce and mobile technology delivering instant gratification and driving a pace of discontinuous change that is tiring,  it may not make sense to say you must be patient in this environment.  In the case of building and maintaining a collaborative relationship with your retail customer, however, this is exactly the case.  I know that is sounds like you are at odds with the technology and capabilities to say have patience, but developing this relationship requires a great deal patience because of the fast paced technology and the experiences of the consumer.  The consumer is being driven and enticed in so many directions and by so many distractions that you must have patience to wait for the consumer to take the time to engage in the collaborative relationship.  

You must maintain your consumer collaborative environment with new content and also new offers and methods and opportunities for interaction with the consumer exactly because you will only have an instant to draw the consumer in and explore.  You will need to provide the encouragement for an extended period of time while you are building the following of consumers.  This will require posting and advertising fresh content and offers on your site to encourage the consumers to return, until it becomes a habit and the become a regular participant in the community.  Remember you are developing a community and it will take a while before the word spreads about the value of the community.  This is exactly why I say that you must have patience when developing this community.

This patience requires the investment to develop new content on a continuous basis.  By continuous basis, I mean that you must invest in the internal resources to prime the pump of the community with fresh content multiple times a day.  You must experiment with the type of content and the time periods when you post the content to determine the most opportune content and time of delivery.  This requires patience and experimentation to develop and deliver the content over a long period of time while your community grows to a critical mass and begins to create content without your continuous involvement.  

This consumer collaboration community is a bit of a good news / bad news story.  The bad news is that you cannot define a time period for how long you will need for the exclusive preparation and delivery of content and the good news is that you will come to a time when you will realize that there is a great deal more content and direct consumer engagement in your community than you are creating yourself.  You must have the patience to get through the period of the hyper level, and cycles, of support with content and offers to encourage the consumer to return and participate.  If you look at the strength of Amazon now it is easy to forget the start-up period where the Amazon site required a great deal of effort to promote and engage the consumer.  You must be prepared for your consumer collaborative environment to require a great deal of effort over a long period of time to provide a return on your investment.  This return on your investment though will fuel your success for a long period of time.

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?