Data is Your Friend – Unless You Refuse to Use It
Posted by Marcus LaRobardiere on Mar 9, 2018
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Anonymous is the best way to describe me each time I walk into a retail store. Regardless of how often I’ve shopped online at that brand or how many times I’ve visited that exact location, I still receive the generic, “Hi, welcome to [fill in the blank]. Let me know if I can help you with anything.” And even more disappointing, I’m often anonymous when shopping online. Despite browsing and buying from these brands for years, there is no reason for me to start from scratch each time I show up online or in person.
It’s no secret that the better a brand knows its customers, the more effectively it can cater to them. Getting to know customers is easier now than it ever has been, yet I remain anonymous.
Technology has made the collection of customer data possible at every level – whether a customer is shopping in-store, on a desktop, or mobile phone, and retailers don’t even need a customer to buy something to begin learning about them, especially if they are browsing online.
In retail, the issue is not that finding the information and collecting the data is difficult. Rather, brands either aren’t deploying the right technology or they aren’t fully utilizing it. This is especially true for legacy retailers who place more focus on their brand than on the consumer. As Steve Sarracino of Activant Capital said during a recent interview with WWD, “the more ‘branded’-oriented retailers are falling down on the customer data side, so in many cases, they don’t know who their best customers are — they have no idea.” In contrast to these older brands, Digital Natives were built on a foundation of data analysis and thrive on using the information they gather. From design to inventory, they don’t make decisions that aren’t in some way connected to data on the way their customers behave.
Achieving a sophisticated level of data utilization is certainly more complicated for a large established brand than it is for Digital Natives, but it is vital that they make the investments to get there. When brands aren’t paying attention to their customers on an individual or an aggregate level, opportunities will be missed and the path toward omnichannel gets infinitely longer. It’s time for brands to give the people what they want.
