The prophets of retail doom are just as evident as they ever have been in the wake of the much-hyped Black Friday. The traditional kick off to the Holiday shopping season, Black Friday appears to have a Pavlovian effect on the dogs of the media.
In tight formation, they breathlessly tell of online retail’s domination of the brick-and-mortar sector. But the problem with their prognostications is that they’re not telling the whole story. That story is more complex and much more hopeful than they’d have you believe.
Complexity and critical examination doesn’t make for short, snappy, click-bait headlines, though.
This post will outline how brick-and-mortar stores can win against online retailers this Holiday by keeping one word in mind – humanity.
The truth about online shopping.
Online shopping is here to stay. It’s put consumers in the driver’s seat. But online retail’s very appeal creates unique opportunities for its brick-and-mortar rival.
Those opportunities exist in the experiences being offered by traditional retailers and those experiences appeal to our basic, shared humanity. Online retail can’t do that. Bots are not human. While they may be more sophisticated than they have been in the past, they can’t smile, or shake your hand, or connect with you on a human level.
Traditional retailers have a genuine opportunity in this. The level of personalization and the customer’s experience of your outlet are what gets that customer out the front door and into your outlet.
Standard approaches aren’t enough. Your outlet’s retail experience must be intentionally humanized.
Making the Holidays Great Again.
We can do everything we need to in the comfort of our own homes. Why go out, when you can do your Christmas shopping online? But it’s not a human experience.
Increasingly, we take the recommendations of faceless online consumer commentators as “gospel”. We order what they say is “the best”. We read the reviews of people we don’t know and will never meet and act according to what they say. We’re becoming less inclined to direct our own consumption and more inclined to let others do our shopping for us.
Gift cards are easy, so we buy them. We fulfil an obligation joylessly and not in any spirit but that of consumerism.
But it’s time to Make the Holidays Great Again, with a rich consumer experience.
Putting the humanity back in shopping.
How brick-and-mortar stores can win against online retailers this Holiday is by putting the humanity back in shopping. The power to do that is in your sales staff. The people on your floor are the flesh and blood emissaries of the Holiday Spirit and they are your advance guard of success.
Ensuring that your sales floor is staffed by employees ready to put the humanity back in shopping and to infuse it with the spirit of the Season is essential to winning, this Holiday Season. Every customer who comes in the store should be welcomed, attended to and served with pleasure – and humanity!
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