Several articles and reports dedicated to fashion retail have been published during this first half of the year. Some of these confirm trends already noted in our blog in recent months. Others, however, broaden the spectrum on the impact of technologies in fashion marketing and the relationship between ecommmerce and brick and mortar. In this article we draw a concise scenario of the main topics that are entering the fashion retailers’ agenda, with some rigorously selected in-depth links.
Redesigning the physical store from an omnichannel perspective
As much as the traditional market may be struggling, digital marketing holds many opportunities, as Forbes notes in a recent article titled “Why Warby Parker Is The Poster Child For The Store Of The Future.”.
In particular, retailers must definitely take up the challenge of omnichannel retailing, which represents a great opportunity to dialogue with an always-connected and therefore potentially always-active consumer. It is about forgetting the old single-channel optimization and rethinking the sales and shopping experience in toto. The article emphasizes the need for retailers to find the “right fit” in terms of the size and functionality of their stores, adopting in-store mobile technologies to better serve customers.
The attitude on the part of people to enter stores and be gratified by a direct contact experience with salespeople, coupled with the opportunity to be able to touch and try products by hand, has not been lost. It is therefore urgently necessary to rethink the role and training of salespeople, giving them tools that enable them to recognize people, manage the interaction and make it more rewarding , in a blend of using technology and brand marketing creativity, an element that is more essential than ever to make the experience interesting.
Nothing is more obnoxious than meeting a salesperson who knows less about products than we do and who has no value to transfer to us.Technology can also obviate some of the typical inefficiencies of the physical chain, such as the possibility of avoiding checkout lines by paying with an app or that of having an out-of-stock product delivered to one’s home (a choice that also proves strategic for reducing stock, being able to limit the floor space of warehouses). Receiving personalized service or advice is in itself a great reason to go to a store, especially if you can enjoy all the benefits of online: from rewarding for loyalty, to in-depth information, from fast payment to home delivery.
Smaller, smarter, more efficient stores seem to be the solution for retailers, not so much of the future, but of the present.Whole article available here:Why Warby Parker Is The Poster Child For The Store Of The Future
Artificial intelligence and big data, what opportunity?
We had already talked about it, but it is worth reemphasizing the importance of this trend, which confirms itself as one of the most cited on fashion retail blogs and magazines. For fashion, where the tastes-often fickle-of customers are the main driver, the opportunity to harness data and put it into a system can allow us to serve them in the best way possible: to suggest how to create pairings, to find the right sizes, to anticipate global trends, to know in advance how people’s tastes will evolve, which today more than ever are driven not only by fashion houses but by the accessibility of content globally (video, music, images, etc.).).Managing this complexity without A.I.-equipped software is not humanly possible.Therefore, it will be machine learning that will support designers and customers, in telling the former what to create and the latter what to wear.
Marketing will therefore be driven by “intelligent” reelaboration of information and will have to act in real time. Proposing the right thing to the right person at the right time (and also in the right way) will become an indispensable element of all technological applications, the results of which are already evident for example in product recommendation or visual search. A summary article on the application of artificial intelligence to the fashion world is available here:Is Fashion Ready For The AI Revolution?
Customer Engagement: chatbots and whatsapp, service and sales
The impact of instant messaging on sales is undoubtedly one of the topics of the moment. While in China the use of Wechat as a sales channel is considered a practice, in Italy the first interesting experiments have moved only recently. One of the earliest and perhaps best known is the use of messenger by Burberry, which has adopted Facebook messaging with the goal of supporting customers in their product selection by dialoguing synchronously with the support of semantic engines to accelerate conversion and improve the user experience. Just in March this year, Yoox Net a Porter Group also announced a major investment in Whatsapp, stating that it will soon be ready to handle a transaction directly within the chat, which is already considered a key tool for dialogue with the high-spending target audience (EIP aka Extremely Important People).The news can be read here: Whatsapp Joins Arsenal Of Online Luxury Amid Race For Customers
