A Strategic Guide for Executives

What’s unique about Experience Commerce? Great experiences are personal, relevant, in context, and consistent across devices. They may start on a tablet during a coffee break, continue the journey on their phone while on a treadmill at the gym, and then make the purchase on their laptop at home in the evening. We have ideas, we think about them, we make a purchase, we share how we feel, and we remember. In our minds as consumers, it’s all one experience. We don’t think in terms of “channels”. Life isn’t a series of stop/start collisions as we ram into clunky interfaces, databases, and systems (or rather, it shouldn’t be). What today’s customers crave is personalized experiences that extend across any channel they decide to use at any time. It should feel easy, natural, and helpful. Companies must be relevant in every step of the customer’s journey and serve up interesting, relevant content at just the right moment. It’s about predicting, with a high degree of accuracy, what the consumer might want to see next. This requires an understanding of consumers as individuals — by gathering and seamlessly interpreting their behaviors across multiple touchpoints. For many brands it’s not happening. Why? Experience Commerce doesn’t happen by accident. Brands need the right strategy to adapt to new realities, and the right tools to enable this transformation. Without these, they won’t be able to deliver on the promise of Experience Commerce. Digital Marketers must deliver campaigns that extend beyond the product catalog and online shopping cart. Brands must stay competitive and relevant to win consumers’ attention. But not knowing where a customer is in the buying cycle makes it difficult to personalize campaigns and go beyond the transaction. It’s also hard to evaluate attribution and uncover the tactics that contribute to higher lifetime customer value and better ROI. Ecommerce professionals may also struggle with legacy ecommerce systems that are purely focused on shopping cart conversion, recognizing that the conversation starts much earlier and extends much wider. They’d love to be able to understand and manage customer complexity across channels, but insufficient access to the right data, due to inflexible and disparate legacy systems, means they don’t stand a chance. Merchandisers also face big challenges. They may work with too many systems that are not integrated and legacy systems, so there’s no single source of the truth. They desperately need “more modern” usability with a consolidated view of all their commerce tools in real time in order to monitor how products are organized, priced, packaged, and listed in the inventory. But instead they have to spend precious time updating multiple online and offline systems. And even then, it’s next-to-impossible to get products displayed correctly. Overall, information and functionality exist within silos — a major problem that stands in the way for all these professionals. Teams are unable to work in harmony. Executives need to invest but are unsure about where. And all of this has a negative impact on the customer. In a fiercely competitive world, this model of marketing is unsustainable. You need the same flexible, integrated tool many of the world’s leading retail brands are leveraging that allows the experience to extend beyond the transaction.