It's no secret that high street retail brands have
been reacting to a change in consumer shopping behaviour pre-covid, with a focus on in-store consumer experiences to compliment their growing online store offering.
The first lockdown fast-forwarded most serious long-term digital transformation plans with brands bottom lines affected overnight, but not all brands reacted equally.
The high street retailers that reacted quickly to the lockdown change which forced their consumers into a digital land will emerge more successful and the laggards somewhat less successful.
Primark’s lack of reaction to change with digital transformation was a gamble that didn’t pay and could cost it £1 billion in lost revenue (xxxxx), a number hard to argue with. In a world which some believe is forever changed, and with consumer behaviour most likely forever influenced through a force of change of habit
With lockdowns that seem to have no end in sight, how are brick and mortar stores responding to a changing world and a changing digital word to remain competitive.
Here’s some things we think that retailers bolstering their online presence should be doing:
Apply massive focus on the PLP and PDP - Be bold, experiment and A/B test Retailers in this space will already know that the Product Listing Page (PLP) and Product Display Page (PDP) is the homepage, and not the homepage. More than 60% of traffic to retail sites arrives directly onto these pages There is a real opportunity to test out bold and brave ideas on a portion of your audience before a massive launch.
Community content is king Research has shown that users want to know what something looks like on their peers, on the street (not in a studio with great and bland lighting) This is going to give your brand the street cred it needs to cut through the studio shots and connect the brand with its community of followers
Allow users experience the brand instead of sell, sell, selling By allowing users to experience your brand, you’re giving them a reason to be loyal, to choose your brand over any other brand, so they buy the brand instead of a product. Similar to a real life retail shop like NikeTown, where you’re hit in the face by the brand as you walk in, you need to hit your user in the face with your brand when they arrive on your site so they soak in the experience and then buy because they love what you stand for, and your brand
Know your customers on an individual level Apps like Dressipi are helping retailers (especially in fashion) to surface curated items suiting their demographic. They have an inhouse fashion (ex-Vogue) and data team who intimately know how to spot trends, curate fashion and then expose those trends based on many data points (facets, like job, personality type (confident etc)) to each individual prospect through AI automation.