You’ve got a great product, a unique brand, you’re top of the range and you’ve got a loyal fan base of committed customers. You can see why you’re the preferred option in your market, but unfortunately that’s not how the retailers see it. Take a look in the Argos catalogue and your product is just another picture with a price tag slapped on, in a line-up of hundreds of others, including some of your main competitors.
Some of the UK’s biggest brands spend an absolute fortune on research and development, marketing and production, only to find that their products are bogged down in the competing messages of rival brands.
Thanks to the ubiquity of Internet shopping, direct to consumer (or D2C) selling is as easy as it’s ever been, without the pain of 30 day shipping windows and automated helplines. Your customers can have a huge amount of choice in the ecommerce arena, from instant payment to next day delivery, and you get to host the relationship from the decision to buy, all the way to the point the money changes hands.
For companies with a product to sell that’s a massive opportunity to make the entire sales process their own, to do something really different and exciting with the ‘Shop’ section of their website. But no. Most of the time, you browse to a category, you choose a product, you add it to a basket and proceed to the checkout. That’s exactly the same, innovation-free experience you’d have at Currys, or Amazon, or John Lewis. The only real difference? You’re likely to pay about 25% less if you shop around than if you buy direct.
Frankly, what’s happening is that brands are wasting the opportunity to differentiate themselves from the tired old sales models of the high street retailers, and are instead trying to play them at their own game. This is a boring strategy, but most of all it’s a losing strategy when the retailers already have huge head-starts in the skills and site traffic required to succeed. What retailers can’t replicate is the kind of personal relationship that brands have a potential to foster between the customer and the product.
Brands often become beloved household fixtures, and the ability to offer once-in-a-lifetime deals, special edition products and exclusive offers is invaluable in this space. For a great example of this just look to Scottish brewer BrewDog, whose #Mashtag campaign let fans design a beer from the ground-up; ingredients, name, label and all. This allows fans to engage with the brand on a much deeper level than they could via a picture on a website, and creates a feeling of ownership around the product and can provide an important feedback loop for brands to get direct customer input into product development.
In the Center For Ecommerce Excellence’s recent DTC Consumer Expectations Survey, three in five shoppers said they anticipated better delivery, better credit card security and a better overall experience when purchasing via retailers’ websites than direct (so, again, it’s crazy to play retailers at their own game). But people did back the brands when it came to extras and exclusives, with almost 75% saying they’d shop D2C if they were able to buy unique products. It’s as simple as playing to your strengths.
One of the main reasons that retailers even exist is as a middle-man between the customer and the brand, who in the past could never hope to have enough outlets or a large enough distribution network to directly engage with the consumer. Thanks to the Internet this is no longer the case; there are millions and millions of people now well within reach and well within the bounds of direct sales via social media. But, if you want to sell to a social audience, you need to sell in a social way - a way that treats them as people, not as walking wallets; a way that encourages and incentivises them to share with their friends, so that today’s fans and followers become tomorrow’s evangelists and marketers.
Right now, many top brands are simply wasting the very real trust and affection that customers feel for their products and letting it fall by the wayside; they’re going for the ‘quantity over quality’ approach, which is something they’ll lose at every time. Imagine if, rather than pointlessly aping retailers and pushing deals out to customers, they crowd-sourced offers, asking their fans what deals, promotions or exclusives they’d like to see, then making the most popular ones happen.
Not only is there a point of difference there that separates their brand from the competition, there’s also a solid foundation from which to build an ongoing relationship with the customer and their friends, rather than just recording another solitary blip on the sales graph.
By Gideon Lask, CEO and founder of Buyapowa.
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