Transforming Business by Allison Cerra & Kevin Easterwood & Jerry Power

Author:Allison Cerra & Kevin Easterwood & Jerry Power
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

If the changing landscape in how one creates, maintains, and promotes a brand is insufficient in throwing marketers off balance, there’s always the altered selling process itself to keep them unsteady. In 2011, the average U.S. shopper consulted 10.4 sources before making a purchase, twice as many as the year before.26 The fact-checking is no longer relegated to research done at home through a stationary broadband connection. More consumers are using the ubiquitous computers attached to their hips—smartphones—to do comparison shopping while in the field. Seventy percent of these smartphone consumers use their device while shopping in-store.27 For retailers, that behavior presents an interesting set of unique challenges. Showrooming—the use of a mobile device to comparison shop for cheaper or better alternatives for a product while in a store—is entering the consumer mainstream. The problem is particularly daunting for big-box retailers, who increasingly find themselves the victims of merchandising the physical product for curious consumers to investigate, only to have said consumers increasingly opt to purchase the product from an online retailer capable of offering cheaper prices. In response, these retailers are turning to sophisticated data collection mechanisms, using technology often embedded in the store, such as Wi-Fi and surveillance cameras, to serve up special targeted offers to consumers about to vacate the premises and likely to purchase the merchandise from another retailer based on showrooming behavior. For companies vying for limited space within major retailers, they may find themselves coerced into offering exclusive promotional pricing or products to earn their slot on the shelf. Advanced negotiation tactics are yet one more way retailers are addressing the showrooming trend, attempting to secure some measure of exclusivity to counter competitive offers, and challenging the traditional rules of channel marketing in the process.

Of course, building a brand, promoting a message, and selling a product presume some understanding of a target market in the first place, bringing the discussion to how a marketer now finds his ideal consumer or prospect. It is perhaps the best of times and the worst of times for marketers in this regard. No longer are they relegated entirely to buying expensive media time through broadcast channels based on broad demographic cohorts. On the contrary, the hundreds of mouse clicks, IPTV channel changes, and location-based updates that consumers make each day reflect a dazzling constellation of preferences, patterns, and intentions. However, effectively mining this data without crossing a fine line into “creepy” territory becomes the new battlefield for marketers. The public narrative had been fairly clear on this debate. Marketers were given considerable free reign in mining their own company’s data in an attempt to offer more targeted or discounted products to their consumers (think of the targeting schemes popularized by grocery stores and large e-commerce retailers as examples).

Marketers had to proceed cautiously when attempting to sell or use their consumer data with third parties. These unwritten, although well understood, rules of the road existed before Target making national headlines. The retailer used its own shopping data and a

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