The retail shopping experience is quite a roller coaster ride across the expansive geo-digital landscape. The highs - dopamine hit, visual stimulation, tactile sensation, inspiration, gratification. The lows - sensory overload, cognitive depletion, visual exhaustion, decision fatigue, buyer’s remorse.
The Retail industry has made great strides to supply an abundance of options and improve the buyer’s journey, but advertisements flood web pages and mailboxes by the thousands, e-commerce sites are disparate, and shopping center locations are sprawled. Customers exert an immense amount of mental and physical energy navigating through it all to meet the needs of their evolving lifestyles.
We're at the intersection of an e-commerce boom, an economic downturn and an AI evolution. This presents us with opportunities to decrease the level of stress required to efficiently produce, sell, and buy products. To start, a proactive approach to help focus energies would be to deploy a data consumer strategy that fuels reverse marketing.
Make data for consumers accessible and searchable
What does a desperate customer and a retail AI agent have in common? Both need product data, stock levels, pricing and customer resources (pre/post sale information, knowledge bases, disclosures) to be highly accessible and searchable. For simplification, I’ll refer to both as “data consumers”.
Imagine a data consumer being able to discover every place where a desired item is in stock, in real-time. Consider the fact that their search might be conducted via phone, map, dashboard, assistant, or VR environment of an entire city, state or country. This is possible today, to some extent. If you did a quick search for a staple food item like “lemons” using a popular app like Google Maps, you’d notice that:
- A small number of grocery retail chains have linked their inventories in app (“See what’s in store”) so that items in stock can be searched for by name.
- Some (but not all) grocery retail stores show “in stock” or “sold here” as stock level indicators, sometimes with a timestamp.
- There are many stores that you know stock these items, in various quantities, but the data is not accessible and thus doesn't show up in search results.
Data consumers should at least be able to discover all product categories for sale in a retail store, on a website. At best, databases or data lakes can be used as cost effective means of serving up unique data sets. Storing everything from manufacturing and product codes, product images, marketing copy, ingredients, materials, color, product origin and other data can be shared to support purchasing decisions. Depending on the deployment method, the chief information officer (CIO) or marketing team can control how much data is shared and make quick changes in real-time.
AI Agents, QR Codes and Blockchain
What about AI chatbots and agents for retail? At some point you’ll need to build or integrate these customer facing tools, but that would still require solidifying your data consumer strategy. In lieu of this, ensure all product data and resources are at least searchable via search features on your e-commerce site.
For e-Commerce, you may not have the best storefront (yet) with tools that simplify uploading product data or analyzing customer behavior and purchases, but developing a data consumer strategy will help streamline workflows and help you pivot once an AI-powered solution becomes available.
Digital transformation always involves data, and ultimately the more data available to consumers, the more visible products will become. The increased adoption of QR codes has allowed data consumers to scan product labels (like “smartlabel”), websites and receipts to discover valuable data about each product, lot and purchase. The eventual adoption of blockchain would support value-added traceability and transparency in supply chains and customer purchases.
What about the downside of sharing more data? It’s no secret that some or all of the data served up may make or break a sale, but is it too old-fashioned to strive for satisfaction and loyalty through transparency? Many of the leading chatbots are adding plugins from 3rd party retail companies that already crawl the web for data. Data scraping bots, price monitoring bots, fake e-commerce stores and retail fast followers are also on the rise, but high quality producers are still in high demand. Remember - you still have control of how much data you choose to share. The ability to deliver competitive value, satisfy consumer demand for knowledge, address sustainability concerns and reduce desperation should still motivate a data consumer conscious strategy.
The Revival of Reverse Marketing
In times of high competition, decision paralysis or crisis, traditional marketing strategies often fall flat. Customers are more attuned to their immediate needs and less receptive to advertising overload. This is where reverse marketing can step in. Reverse marketing prioritizes building relationships and empowering customers before a sale. Instead of bombarding customers with promotional messages and trying to push products, it shifts toward persuasion, value co-creation and engagement. In recent years, it's been deployed by top brands like Fenty Beauty, Glossier, Body Shop, HelloFresh, Patagonia, Tesla, Toyota, Etsy, and IKEA -- all recognized for their value and commitment to customer lifestyles and sustainable business.
Consider the following personas and needs:
- Busy High Performing Professionals: They want to consume snacks and meals that dispense food as medicine and aid performance enhancement.
- Singles and Families: They want to provide consistent, healthy, cost-effective meals to a group of 1-5 (various age ranges).
- Apartment Renters: They want to furnish an energy and space efficient rental (<850 sq ft) with furniture, kitchen devices and decor for a determined period of time.
- Want-to-be Minimalist Professionals: They want to purchase garments from local designers to create a capsule wardrobe, with traceable materials and minimal microplastic and microfibre environmental impact.
- Luxury Collectors: They want to secure luxury goods for occasional use, certifications to confirm quality and guidance to support resale.
If your mission is to serve any of the personas above, then the marketing content you create should communicate your commitment and ability to fulfill the scope of their needs in all or in part. These needs are indeed complex, but we’ve reached a point where both product data, AI and automation can help facilitate transactions that address the full scope of lifestyle needs with one or few-shots.
Businesses have an opportunity to showcase value, commitment and impact by:
- Sharing a unique mission, consumer-facing KPIs, and triple bottom line sustainability goals to communicate transparency in how they operate and sustain customer demand.
- Offering information, tips, and resources to help consumers navigate fulfilling their immediate needs, with consideration for various demographics, interests and interaction levels.
- Empowering customers by allowing them to give feedback on products or services.
- Fostering a sense of community with like minded businesses and customers, creating touch points where people can connect, share experiences or trade.
- Offering incentives that clearly align with lifestyles, like convenience options and price savings for bundles or bulk purchases.
Custom business or 3rd party chatbots and agents can then create data-driven experiences that deliver insights, perform personalized shopping tasks, alert data consumers of purchasing opportunities and constraints, provide more control over data, triage customer feedback and highlight opportunities for co-creation. IMPORTANT - Please, please please don't fill your site with AI generated inaccurate or useless data (trash)! It won't drive positive results.
Will reverse marketing replace traditional marketing? Well, consider this - Personalized agents alone can be armed with an immerse amount of customer generated information or context about lifestyle, personality, health, family, community and values -- then produce responses or execute tasks in seconds. Compare this to the time it takes businesses to buy data and use targeting tools to create near-personalized ads, and you’d find a huge opportunity loss. Preparing for the AI shift starts with serving up data that can be pulled on demand. Reverse marketing from the top would simplify the sales cycle for both business and consumer.
Serve value and data
Proactive efforts to make your data searchable and accessible will allow data consumers to analyze options, increasing confidence and gratitude. Reverse marketing will ultimately help businesses build loyalty and advance their mission in community. AI will help advance the ability of whole segments of customers to purchase lifestyle solutions from businesses they value, and at minimum meet immediate needs, but with less stress.
Want to continue the conversation? Join us for one of our Innovation Primers or book an Innovation Strategy session today! 🦅
