I hate shopping.
This comes as no surprise to anyone that knows me. Even the thought of schlepping into my nearest high street or mall is enough to send me into an unhappy place, let alone the dodging and bustle through other shoppers and traffic once I’m there. It may not even be my fault -there’s good evidence to suggest that I may be genetically programmed to think of shopping as hunting, a mission to be achieved, a box to be ticked.
Either way, I definitely like to know where I’m going, what I need to get, and how long it’s going to take me to do it. And while I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in being like that, it’s clear that not everyone is the same. See if you recognise yourself in:
the social wanderer: tends to walk in pairs, chatting, likes to stop and pick at interesting items, and then move on. Rarely buys.
the forthright haggler: loves nothing more than striking a bargain, even if it means walking away and coming back another day
the personal shopper: the shopping professional, knows shop assistants by names, never clutching fewer than 5 bags in each hand
the dressing room widower: often sitting outside waiting rooms, looking like they’d rather be anywhere else.
We’re all different - but you don’t have to look too hard to spot some common characteristics that many of us share. If you were a marketer, you’d try and spot these differences by looking at our ages, genders, income, ethnicity or other demographic information. Or you could try delving into our personalities, attitudes and interests through psychographic research, and see which conclusions you found there. But these kinds of studies don’t tend to show up the things that we like to do - those little rituals that we all take part in, the ways that we go about doing things in our daily life.
So for most retail brands, it’s been difficult trying to match their shopping experience to the things that their customers want to do - and this has been amplified by new behaviours and ways of shopping brought about by the development of new digital technologies.
For what it’s worth, digital has also brought new ways of thinking about customer experience. For online customers, it’s way easier to jump between retailers in order to find a better deal, a broader range of products or a more personal brand experience - and so online retailers have had to look smart and sharpen their digital shopfronts to make sure that they’re giving customers what they want, as fast as they want it. Digital shopkeepers are firmly adroit at creating and working with user personas - virtual customer archetypes designed to bring to life the key goals and behaviours of important users, draped in a believable skin of demographic backstory. By focusing their design teams on the explicitly voiced needs of these priority customers, the best online retail experiences give users as friction-free a shopping experience as possible, and delivers that value back to the business in improved conversion and fewer drop-offs.
As the digital and physical spheres overlap more and more, shoppers are becoming augmented with new abilities and powers with which to find and buy stuff more effectively - and some of the tools which we’ve been using in digital design are going to start becoming more powerful in the real world of ‘customer experience’.
I’m loathe to future-gaze almost as much as I am to go shopping, but we’re not pulling back the curtain very far by suggesting that in the near future, we’ll be able to:
search for products in specific physical locations, and then be guided straight to them without having to speak to a shop assistant or spend time hunting through the aisles. Google is rolling out its indoor mapping services and this smart startup is figuring out how to use LED lights to identify your indoor position with an accuracy of 1m. For those who hate to hunt!
replenish our consumable goods through digital loyalty apps - allowing us to opt-in to ordering systems that ensure we’re never without that coffee capsule or dishwasher tablet. It’s actually not too hard to build a rough estimate of consumption behaviours by extrapolating from purchase frequency - but when these devices are all internet-enabled, we’ll be able to pinpoint ordering based on real-time use.
shop by look: by pointing your phone at a well dressed passer-by or at someone else’s well-appointed living room, you’ll be able to buy the whole ensemble. Image recognition technology will be able to match individual items to retailers’ product catalogues, and make it a breeze to buy a collection of curated items - think Supermarket Sarah meets the real world.
receive deals and money off simply by being in the right place at the right time: time-based flash sales like Woot have proved to be a winner online, and it makes sense that this would be replicated in the real world. By delivering offers to shoppers’ mobile devices based on their proximity to a store, brands could drive footfall and in-store engagement in much the same way that a flashmob is coordinated.
Shoppers now have abilities that they’ve never had before - they’re super powered and super informed - to be able to make better purchases. Successful future retail brands will learn how to adapt their sales and customer service offer to allow their customers to behave how they want, to demand the best deal available to them, and save them time by fitting into their lifestyle.
So - even though more empathy on the high street sounds like a Good Thing for shoppers like me, it’s also going to lead retailers towards a new focus on ensuring their brand experiences are adaptive and sensitive to all the nuance and idiosyncrasy that we live with.