Retailing, Product Standardization and Changes in Marketing
Retail is an ancient business. This depended on a merchandise, a sales person, coupled with overt observance of the customer, and real-time response to needs, whether buying pepper, weapons or passage on a boat, with follow on checks to expand business. This customer care was in person as much as possible and generally appreciated by customers.
The past few decades have brought rapid product standardization, with reduced product costs at higher quality— and the need for skilled sales, like furniture from IKEA, generic jeans and t-shirts (sold with minimal sizing and fit options) — and even the self-service sale of petroleum products. The list goes on. Standardization has driven scale, global availability and helped lift the standard of living of billions.
This process has provided millions of entry level jobs, for students and other part-timers across the world. Does anyone still buy (standard) computers at a computer store? Or (standard) paper at a stationery store?
However, the past 10 years in particular have another acceleration riding on top of the product standardization wave — the transition from overt and transparent customer interaction, to a persistently covert, unethical (but legal) digital “marketing” methodology, with the resulting information consolidated on a handful of electronic retailers and cookie-managers.
Retailers are now forced to bid against each other for “key words” and develop multiple ad campaigns with “A/B” tests to develop product and market theses. All this is another way of saying “I really don’t know which ad will work and why, so lets spray a bunch of cash at online ads, and I’ll come back with fancy metrics to show you which ads work best. Then we can try and figure out why.”
Retailers are so isolated from customers and vice versa, that “digital” is the new intersection. Customer confidence is supplied by “influencers” who farm and harvest their followers to the highest bidder.
But we are not going back to the “old days”. Time does not go backwards.
So how can we move forward with more ethics and more choice?
I believe we need real-time analysis of customer interaction, and use that to drive better in-person sales in the here and now. Use that information to also drive digital spend more carefully as well. Use online venues to sell standard products, and physical venues to sell differentiated products. Don’t waste shelf space on standard t-shirts.
More understanding of customers. Less cash spraying, and more precision targeting of digital ads.
No cookie tracking. No privacy invasion. It is viable.
