Making people more interested in your brand is one challenge. Making them more loyal is quite another.
The widespread availability of plate glass in the second half of the 19th century gave retail store owners the technology required to begin constructing windows that ran the full length of their street-fronts. According to Zada, it didn’t take long for department stores in particular to spot the advantages of showing off what they had inside. In 1874, Macy’s upped the ante by creating a holiday window display featuring porcelain dolls from around the world. As major retailers gravitated to major cities and competition between them increased, the displays in their stores also became more elaborate.
The power of timing
140 years on from that first holiday window display, retailers are still looking for ways to entice people to visit – except now the windows are digital as well as physical and the stores too are just as likely to be online. And in this world of the increasingly mobile consumer, timing is everything according to this new study. Just as display artists sought to stop people in their tracks and to lure them inside, moments-based marketers are using offers to tempt online passers-by their way. The study found that consumers respond to rewards (no surprises there) but the real shift in inclination comes when those rewards arrive at a moment when people are most engaged and receptive. Think of this as an “experience halo” in effect. While you’re here. Using the energy of an experience to propel buyers into making a further commitment in exchange for something that feels good right now.
It sounds like a big data dream. Track the behaviour patterns so that you know where people are likely to be and what they are likely to be doing, then deliver offers, rewards and ideas that ensure everyone gets a little uplift at the time they feel most inclined. Maybe that’s a tactical challenge for marketing in the years ahead. Not just reaching buyers. But connecting with them at a time when they are most impulsive.
There’s little doubt that as brands become more responsive in their approach to an increasingly mobile consumer base, the tactics that have worked so well elsewhere will be further adapted for new marketing use. Expect more moment-focused “specials”, with screens as the time-sensitive revolving shop windows and swipes as the new traffic lanes pulling buyers deeper and deeper into online environments to browse.
Finding loyalty beyond impulse
But then what? Engaging buyers via rewarding tactics may pull people in, even keep them in, and yield a whole lot of feel-good metrics but for me that should be just the beginning of a much more important and challenging journey – the transit from the shopper as magpie (attracted by shiny little objects) to the person who shops as, and identifies themselves as, a loyal customer.
A rewarding journey rather than a journey of rewards
Unless you have earned loyalty, you are relying on impulse (albeit based on sophisticated patterning via serious number crunching) as your brand’s principal motivator. And the risk there is that in the rush to entice the next behaviour, you forget to get buyers to commit, or you mistake sequential behaviours for commitment. They’re not – and here’s why. Being committed to the brand and enjoying the extra rewards along the way is a very different headspace for a consumer than only enjoying the brand when there are rewards to be had.
Have a pretty window (physical and digital) by all means. Fill it with jewels. Reveal more momentary rewards to keep buyers interested. But don’t stop there. Keep asking “Now where do the brand-crumbs lead?” There’s some nice thinking on this point at the ever-thoughtful Emotive Branding blog.
Acknowledgements
Photo of “D&G Saigon” taken by @Saigon, sourced from Flickr
