Social Commerce Strategic Direction

Strategy is many different things to many different people and retailers run the gamut of strategies now in their struggle to maintain success.  In my opinion a strategy combines culture, current capabilities, strength and a vision of the the future that is desired to define a direction and steps to make the vision reality.  These ingredients to the strategy provide important building blocks to achieving the vision of the future and the basic objective of strategy is achieving the vision of the future.  Every retailer has a strategy and a vision of the future and they struggle every day with maintaining this strategy in the face of changing consumer and market demands.  As a result of changing demands I believe that retailers must fundamentally change their strategic definition to incorporate the consumer changing demands.

Retailers must focus their strategic support tools on a flexible foundation and the tools to support analyzing and understanding consumer and market demands.  In addition, and most importantly, retailers must change their culture and especially leadership to support a long term vision and drive for these strategic support tools.  The market is changing to quickly for retailers to expect to maintain the rate of change under their current framework foundation, processes and procedures, tools and culture.  In order to meet these quickly changing demands retail leadership must focus on a strategy that can support the rate of change and a culture that can recognize and embrace the changes.  In other words, retailers must develop a long term strategy for change that support incremental changes to support changing market demands.  

This change requires collaboration as a foundation in order to listen and learn quickly and efficiently.  I see this as a major challenge for most retailers and especially the large legacy retailers.  These retailers have embraced and internalized a strategy of low cost and operational efficiency to support the low cost.  This encouraged a cumbersome command and control structure that was difficult to change and is now a hindrance to success due to the impact of the Internet on the consumer market.  This strategy worked in the past where consumers had limited choices in retail outlets and allowed the retailer to focus on efficiencies delivered through size.  The Internet changed all of that and as the offerings and improvements in usability grew the consumers moved to this market.  

A social commerce strategy requires as a foundation collaboration across all partners and treating the consumer as an equal partner at the table.  This is a dramatic change to the retail culture that requires the support and guidance of the retail leadership.  Retailers must embrace a social commerce strategy that dramatically shortens the change cycle and also provides for a means to collaborate and seek guidance from consumers and other partners in the types of changes that will meet the consumer and market demands.  This all requires a foundation framework of flexibility that supports change easily and quickly.

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?

Start With Social Commerce Big Data

Social commerce will create a huge amount of information as part of the consumer interaction and collaboration and this should be planned for by the retailer and their extended partners.  The data and relationships cross partners and so it is very important to be able to interact and access the data across multiple partners.  Since the interaction is across partners, the data access and analysis must also be performed across partners.  This now adds a great deal of complexity to the challenge to capture and utilize the data across multiple partners.  This is why it is so important for partners to work together to first develop a cohesive strategy and data structure framework that supports the objective of sharing data and analysis across multiple partners.

Big data initiatives of this nature are very complex and require a very high degree of collaboration in order to bring value to all partners.  I would expect there to be varying degrees of acceptance and integration by various partners depending on the perceived value by those partners.  This does not mean that the initiative should wait while the various partners negotiate involvement and participation practices.  Each partner in the extended chain have specific pieces of information they collect to analyze flow, consumer acceptance and costs of transactions and this should not stop.  The collaborative data analysis provides value by supporting  a framework that allows and encourages analysis across partners by combining data available from the different partners that will enhance the understanding and improve the research results.  

This type of initiative is a long term investment in collaboration and technology across partners and the value attained from this collaboration and data access will grow as the collaboration and questions grow.  This does require a rather large investment in both capital dollars to fund the development and research along with a rather large investment in the concepts and even changing the cultures of the extended partner as guided by the results of the analysis.  This investment in culture and time is the greatest hurdle because it requires a leap of faith until the benefits begin to be delivered by the analysis.

The greatest challenge for retailers in this climate is the ability to mount and maintain a long term strategy in any practice.  Retailers have been buffetted by consumer change and have jumped from one practice to another without seeming to maintain a long term strategy.  I believe that it is critical now for retailers to develop and maintain a long term strategy that focuses on collaboration and flexibility and a change in culture.  Without this strategic plan retailers will continue to flounder through the capability of the day and will simply draw out the slow death spiral.

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?

Big Data In Social Commerce

Retailers and their partners require a method to understand consumer actions and interactions in the social commerce world and this requires big data techniques and tools to support the level of detail required for this analysis.  Considering the number of social outlets, channels and mobile apps involved in social commerce the level of data required for analysis is immense.  This requires a thoughtful strategy and implementation in order to achieve value and develop the analysis practices to understand the consumer interaction and support and react to the consumer demands.  These consumer interactions cross channels and outlets from eCommerce to social networks and this requires a very thoughtful and continuous analysis of the outlets and the data in order to achieve and most importantly maintain a value chain from the data collected.

Retailers must engage their extended partner chain to develop and maintain the steady stream of information that can be utilized to support shopping and purchasing demands of consumers.  Without this strategy to collect and analyze this data retailers and their extended partner chain will flounder from one new consumer demand to another.  This cannot be maintained and hope to succeed without a robust strategy and the tools to monitor and maintain this strategy.  This strategy must cross and include all of the extended partners through the chain and must be maintained and provide value across all extended partners in the chain.  This requires an extremely high level of collaboration and flow of information across the partner chain which itself requires a high level of commitment and participation across the partner chain.

The good news is that the tools are currently available to support these needs and the bad news is that it requires an investment across the chain that many partners have not anticipated or planned to engage.  This requires leadership and engagement in order to begin.  I do not think this necessarily requires any one partner to start the process but it does require a champion that can articulate, engage and encourage participation from other partners.  This requires someone to start the process by beginning with a definition of their objectives and then an analysis and definition of requirements and steps to meet the objectives.  

This initial start does not require participation from any one partner in order to begin, the social commerce practice and methods touch all partners in the extended chain and each partner will gain from the collaboration.  This ‘simply’ requires at least one of the partners to begin the exercise and then to begin their engagement with other partners to develop the methods and capabilities.  The one key to the success of this exercise though is investment and participation from partners.

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?