Who doesn’t love a good story? Storytelling is how we connect with each other and share experiences. A retailer’s brand story helps consumers make a connection that drives purchase decisions and engagement. When we can relate emotionally, when we are inspired, we naturally gravitate to the brands that tell a story we care about.
Your brand promise sharpens your competitive advantage and increases customer loyalty. It allows you to tap into different aspects of your customers’ lives and create an emotional connection to the brand. With so much noise, retailers need a compelling and engaging way to “win the battle for attention.” The best way to do this is with relevant content that resonates with customers and is integrated across all touchpoints along the customer buying journey. You want to focus on creating and sharing content that is meaningful, aligns with what consumers care about/what matters to them, and is not always related to promoting products or actively selling.
How to support your brand story with a curated product assortment tailored to your customers
It’s one thing to “tell” the story, you also have to show it with a product assortment that best aligns with your brand and speaks to the consumer. Using data analytics and insights, you can home in on what consumers care about and determine the types of products/categories they’d be interested in so you can curate and personalize your product selection and recommendations to the individual.
Today’s consumers are searching for increasingly specific items. For example, it’s not “high waist jeans” being typed in the search tab, now it might be “sustainably produced high waist jeans from black-owned businesses.” To meet this type of demand, you need to be able to surface the right products from a larger network of suppliers, while making them easily accessible to the right customers. This means getting more specific attributes and details from suppliers and optimizing product content so that customers can always find what they’re searching for. Retailers can’t rely on a traditional retail (wholesale) model to achieve this. Instead, you need ecommerce capabilities that can increase and curate selection at scale. When you can’t diversify selection, it’s driving customers elsewhere.
You know that drop ship and marketplace capabilities leverage flexibility and speed in a way that limits risk to the retailer because they don’t need to hold inventory. Ecommerce also helps a retailer expand upon physical assets. For example, you can connect customers with brands that may be digitally native, or that don’t wholesale, to better serve the customer. It also allows you to build agile, flexible brand partnerships so you can pivot quickly and tell a richer story that’s right for your brand. It delivers added value to the customer and enables you to show up for customers in a bigger way by offering more choice.
We’d love to help you tell a rich brand story. Contact us.