What’s the Difference Between Digital and ‘Modern Retailing’? Real Consumer Understanding

For airline marketers and perhaps marketers everywhere, Google’s ‘flight recommendation’ function deserves a conversation. On the one hand it is doing what we’re all meant to be doing these days. It is ‘Making information accessible and useful’ per their stated mission (although this seems to be changing to ‘making AI useful and less scary’?).

And from a certain point of view, it does this well. Google’s flight feature scrapes data from airline’s websites, compares them and packages the comparison as a ranking of the consumer’s ‘best choice’. From the convenience of the device in your hand, Google will tell you which airline ranks best in terms of cost, flight duration and also - topically - carbon emissions. The mobile web app appears to indeed make this information useful. Just ask Google who to fly with and the answer appears.

But is this how consumers choose their airline?

Well, I would argue it isn’t. Perhaps for a certain segment that flies infrequently, this maybe true. Price certainly matters and travel duration too, but for most of us, it isn’t the way we choose at all. The actual experience of choosing an airline, like most product categories is a much more complicated one that brings together consciously known things (like price and travel duration) with a whole host of other information some of which is known to us and others just exist as feelings - from previous experiences or impressions from other sources including friends and things like advertising impressions.

So how important are those ‘tangible factors’? Recently conducted research shows that while price is important, in the airline category at least, it accounts for roughly 25% of the consumer’s brand choice. Product performance (things like leg room and comfort etc) is another 25% and the remainder could be referred to as the ‘brand in mind’; things like reputation and associated emotions that the brand illicit. That’s a whopping 50%.

However, none of these brand in mind factors are part of the recommender engine. While in reality, people routinely agonize over balancing price with the performance advantages of more expensive brands Google’s flight recommendation app doesn’t represent them at all. It suggests that all airlines are the same, so to make your choice, you just need to compare price and duration.

And then there is the intangible ‘comfort’ factor, not the physical one - but psychological comfort. That feeling of reassurance of buying a famous, leading brand rather than trying a lesser known, newer one. I’m referring to the subconscious ‘type 1’ thoughts are hard to put our finger on and explain, but we know they’re there. They are the driver behind the way that people have already decided, they just don’t know it yet.

The reality is, that in the modern retailing environment, emotions and brand reputation aren’t really represented at all. The default setting for product listings is by price. Given this, on many routes, it can take some scrolling to reach the premium brands whether this be in the airline or other categories.

And in some e-commerce platforms there are often photos of products and some bullet points of key features. In the airline category, airlines choices are mostly represented by the most cursory of information - price and brand logo. No imagery of the seats, the cabin environment or meal choices are included to help represent the true meaning of the brand choice and some of the elements that lie behind the price differences, driving them.

So the modern retailing environment is mostly a poor representation of the actual choices on offer. What it does offer of course is convenience. The ease of making some kind of comparison on your personal device. But in order to make a meaningful choice (and probably one that avoids buyers remorse), the consumer has to do a lot of work themselves. They need to pause and think - what are these brands known for, how are the experiences different and what do I value and am prepared to pay for.

In summary, retailing on digital platforms today, for the most part, leaves out very important information and asks consumers to basically decide on price alone. For any premium brand, this is not good a good place to be as products are presented as near commodities. Furthermore, it often feels that in modern retailing channels, that we’re going back in time to the era of the USP. 

Extruded over time, with price and basic product functions being used to make purchase decisions, and brand points of difference not really explained or represented, one would assume that the brands themselves would become less important as a decision making factor. Is it too much to say that the current practice of digital retail is anathema to premium brands and the concept of brands in general?

How did we get here? It is safe to say that the modern retailing market place has not been built by marketers but instead by technicians. People with IT backgrounds that know how to create software solutions that synthesize traditional market places in digital forms.

As the builder, they tend to prioritize the platform and scale efficiencies, requiring consumers to adapt to it, rather than the other way round. After decades of discussion and development, the vision of meaningful mass personalization in digital retail is not yet an everyday reality.

What needs to happen

The process of building modern retailing platforms needs an overhaul. This should start with a review on who sits around the table. In addition to the usual IT talents, people with a consumerist background need to be involved in order to ‘humanize’ the experience.

Marketers, market researchers, industrial designers, behavioral scientists and the like need to be present in the design and build phases to represent the ‘inconvenient truths’ of what consumers want to know, see and feel, rather than the assembly of basic data that we have at present.

A more humanistic modern retail space would allow visitors to view content on the product in different ways. Micro content and installed technology would enable the user to easily zoom in for super close ups to see the quality of stiching and get a sense of the texture of materials (as people do in brick and mortar environments), 360 rotations and being able to see customers with the products would also help.

Some luxury brands are doing this as a point of difference, but most of the large digital marketplaces showcase product in list view with little scope or choice to really inspect the product prior to buy. As a consequence, there is a small industry dedicated to sending the product back within the free return window.

For experiential brands like airlines, hotels and perhaps even restaurants and bars, content and interfaces that enable the consumer to conduct walk-arounds, ‘fly-throughs’ be ‘virtually there’ would be helpful. Why does it need to be that it is only when you’re in the hotel you realize that there aren’t USB charging points in the bedside table? For some, this is a major pain point and for others, it is irrelevant.

Different people like different things, that is the point. Although there are some perceived cost barriers, I believe it is a matter of time until these kinds of technologies become everyday and not just for high end goods and luxury hotels.

But we beyond virtually there capabilities, other information should be and could be included. While star ratings have become tainted with instances of employee and paid-for reviews, many people still feel comfort from them as they are a proxy for the crowd that you can get from a ‘real store’.

However, there are many independent and credible rating systems that retailers could use and this would be something that traditional retail never did well asking consumers to make a leap of faith.

In the airline space, there are lots of things that people care about and could be represented. Things like industry rankings, screen size, number of movies and whether they are censored or not (a little understood difference until you discover in flight that your movie is now 20 mins shorter than the official version and the key scene maybe missing entirely).

Research shows for example that inflight dining occupies a large place in the psychology of travelers. It can be a delightful surprise or a real let down. Which ever it is, we know that people love to talk about it because the inflight meal breaks up the tedium of long haul travel. Including imagery of the inflight dining experience therefore is quite relevant to the consumer’s decision. This and potentially so much more.

The wrap up

The digital revolution is aptly titled because we can now do so much and know so much ‘in the palm of our hands’. This has totally changed how brands and products distribute themselves.

However, far from patting ourselves on the backs, we should be identifying the unmet needs as researchers know to call them, the things that people want that they can’t get. From the digital retail experience, there is a long list to work from.

Brands should interrogate those consumer behaviors in physical retail and prioritize those that don’t exist in the digital environments today and enjoy the growth in consumer preference that will follow. Only when retail embraces the customer’s experience and those professionals who specialize in this, can they transition from mere digital retail into becoming truly modern retailers.