Commentary
Not Channel, But Service Shoppers
- by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, August 21, 2018
According to author Steve Rowen, for RSR research, for quite some time our industry has grappled a term to describe how people really shop. Omni-channel, channel-less, or post-channel. Whichever you prefer, says the report, the principle remains the same; consumers don’t think about channels, they just shop wherever and however they …
Jack Loechner is the Editor of The Center for Media Research's daily Research Brief. You can reach him at jack@mediapost.com.
Right, "consumers don’t think about channels, they just shop wherever and however they like." A perspective on this, and on the increasingly service-centered nature of modern commerce is in my recent post, "The Relationship Economy -- It's All About Valuing Customer Experiences" (http://bit.ly/FPZTien). Channels are a company-centric artifact of pre-digital commerce, increasingly irrelevant in our connected, customer-centric world.
Some related points on this are in my "Bricks and Clicks -- Showrooming, Riggio, and Bezos" (http://bit.ly/2rJUhFh), which suggests the channel view of bricks vs. clicks is "just an aspect of that. It is much like the famous New Yorker's View of the World magazine cover by Steinberg. Traditional retail businesses view online from their store-centered perspective, adding online services to counter and co-opt the enemy attack.
Online businesses view stores from the online-centered perspective, dabbling in stores and depots to expand their beachhead. Only a few, like Bezos, see the big picture of an agnostic, flexible blend of resources and capabilities that most effectively provide what we want, when and how we want it."
"To see the larger view we must climb above our attachments to stores and warehouses, or Web sites and apps. We must consider the objectives of the customers and how best to give them whatever they want, with whatever resources can be applied, as costs permit. How we orchestrate those resources to meet those objectives will change rapidly, as our systems and their integration improves. Only the most far-sighted and nimble will see and go more than a few steps down this path."