The Seven Virtues of Evolving Retail Marketplaces
by Danielle Wintrip
introduction
The concept of virtue is universally understood. Virtues guide our attitudes, behaviors, and interactions. Since the agricultural revolution, retail marketplaces have been a place for human interaction, and while retail has transformed since then, our fundamental virtues have not changed to the same degree. As we participate in the evolution of retail marketplaces, we can look to the following seven virtues as good and useful qualities to guide us.
Temperance is the habit of being modest, adaptable, and considerate. In a retail marketplace, it means making people’s lives easier by listening to consumers and adapting to their changing cultural and lifestyle needs.
For example, this year, home delivery is led by one company.
· Accepts orders from anywhere and at any time
· Supply chain dominates the competition
· Delivery systems are on technology’s cutting edge
· Carefully monitors and records every purchase
· Keeps detailed demographic information on each of its millions of customers
· Loyalty program offers significant incentives
· Sells both branded & private label products
· Has begun to add retail stores to its primary business
· Competitors all complain about an unfair advantage
The year is 1897, not 2020, and the company is Sears Roebuck. Alas, Sears folded, but it still holds the first prize for retail innovation.
No doubt, 21st-century shopping is more efficient than it ever has been. Retailers and their systems are continually being made wiser from tech and data. But still, the innovation is mostly behind the scenes, in operations. Delivery technology is far less sophisticated. Waiting for our purchases, especially in a pandemic, is a consumer pain point.
Who, or what is going to deliver your packages in the future? The challenge for autonomous package delivery, as with drones, has been the package hand-off from vehicle-to-door. MIT researchers are working on a piece of that puzzle by using AI to teach a robot to find your front door. Ford envisions furnishing a self-driving car with a robot passenger called Digit, who will carry your purchases from car-to-door. Once the ‘last mile’ puzzle is solved, what will be the motivating factor to drive traffic to bricks-and-mortar retailers?
Like Sears & Roebuck and Amazon have shown, retail marketplaces can demonstrate courage by upending the received wisdom about shopping. Right now, package design’s holy grail is the retail “moment of truth,” the magical retail instant when a consumer grabs the product from the shelf, puts it in the cart, and a relationship becomes a transaction.
Amazon looks set to change the relationships between brands and stores by expanding that “moment of truth” beyond the shelf and exploring a range of both digital and brick and mortar experiences. Adopting both is a seismic change because, for over a century, in-store shopping has determined how all products are designed, packaged, and shipped. If Amazon succeeds, brands will think less about how products work on shelves. Instead, they will focus on developing products that ship quickly to customers’ doorsteps and have in-home advantages.
Online retail has brought justice and democracy to the brand-buyer relationship. Before, brands spoke, and consumers listened – creating an unequal relationship between the two. Now there are much more equitable conversations among brands, consumers, and even competitors. There are crossovers and co-brands, like in music. It is an ecosystem regulated by all.
We see this democratic approach extending into a future DIY world where both the product and the package will become a medium for both consumers and brand owners. Think of Absolut Vodka. They have amplified their customers’ voices through their packaging to such an extent that the brand’s virtues can absolutely be said to be just and democratic.
You will be more likely to trust a product marketed well to you. The condom is an example of a product that has traditionally excluded young women in its marketing. As a result, females find traditional condom package designs to be garish, blatant, and unattractive. Because of their look and marketing, buying the box and having it at home is a distasteful experience.
Enter the Trojan condom brand XOXO, which was for the lifestyle of the buyer, a young woman who values discretion. The brand design and its package structures are subtle, stylish, and practical. The consumer feels the faith in the brand because she is understood and validated in a friendly yet respectful way.
Brand promises are noisy. Wander around a store, and you will hear packaging and people yelling free offers, singing free-range, promising free radicals, and whispering sugar-free. Underneath is the beat of products murmuring, “Take me home.” When you do, the noise moves to your cupboard.
Does it have to be this way? The marketer achieved their desire; I bought the mushroom soup. But what about the potential of the product in-home? In my dimly lit pantry, can the messages communicating brand, product type, and benefits be delivered in a very different way then they were on shelf? In homes across the nation, bathroom countertops and vanities display a chaotic jumble of personal care items, not at all as beautiful as they looked in store. But what if I could choose the package design for my hairspray, tissue box, or face cleansing wipes, for example. The products could then match my décor, or at least one another, and my vanity would look more tailored to my lifestyle.
The challenge to marketers is, what should a brand’s package say, and where, in this conversation?
Nothing brings us together, like eating together. At the table, food expresses love, and that love feeds our soul and our need for connection. Many food retail marketplaces have successfully captured the feelings of eating together and reproduced it in the experience of shopping for the meal. They are successfully using love as a motivator in retail.
On the other hand, we have ultra-efficient online or online/offline marketplaces. Interactions with these giants are cold, machine-like, and in terms of visual experience, often ugly. When efficiency becomes the ultimate objective, we sacrifice the soul of the retail experience.
conclusion
In the end, a marketplace cannot exist without consumers; it will always be a place, online or off, where people connect. We can use virtues as our guide to compel successful and meaningful experiences and connections. Let us aim to build virtuous retail marketplaces, ones that are modest, fair, trustworthy, brave, wise, and act in hope and love.