Digitial Engagement and New Ways of Shopping

In this article, Prof. Alberto Dávalos from IMDEA, introduces digitial engagement and news ways of shopping.

What is digitial engagement?

Digital engagement is anything and everything that involves a communication; and ises digitial tools and techniques to find, listen to and mobilise a community around an issue. In digitial engagement, organisations often have relatively little control over the channels and messages being communicated. With digital engagement companies become more like living businesses, building and sustaining symbiotic ties with their customers.

Figure 1: Digitial Engagement

Click to expand

Customer Experience

In the past, customer retention strategies relied on buying loyalty with rewards, rebates or discounts. The four P’s of marketing are key factors that are commonly used in marketing a good or service. They include:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

However, the four P’s exclusively often target a static customer archetype. While really, everyone’s needs vary depending on time and context. With today’s technologies, companies now have the ability to see and act on these fluctuations in the moment. Transforming the four P’s to:

• Purpose: Customers feel the company shares and advances their values
• Pride: Customers feel proud and inspired to use the company’s products and services
• Partnership: Customer’s feel the company relates to and works well with them
• Protection: Customers feel secure when doing business with the customer
• Personalization: Customers feel their experiences with the company are continuously tailored to their needs and priorities

The Age of Continuous Connection

New technologies have made 24/7 customer relationships possible. The old approach involved companies interacting with customers only episodically when customers came to them. Today, thanks to new technologies, companies can address customers’ needs the moment they arise, and sometime even earlier. With connected strategies, firms can build deeper ties with customers and dramatically improve their experiences. Moving forward, companies need to make continuous connection a fundamental part of their business models. They can do this with four strategies:

1. Respond to desire: Customer expresses what they want and when. This works best when customers are knowledgeable and for customers who don’t want to share too much data and who like to be in control.

2. Curated offering: Firm offers tailored menu of options to customer allowing good personalized recommendations. This works best when the uncurated set of options is large and potentially overwhelming and for customers who don’t mind sharing some data but want a final say.

3. Coach behaviour: Form nudges customer to act to obtain a goal. This works best when inertia and biases keep customers from achieving what’s best for them and for customers who don’t mind sharing personal data and getting suggestions.

4. Automatic execution: Firm fills customer’s need without being asked. This works best when customer behaviour is very predictable and costs of mistakes are small and for customers who don’t mind sharing personal data and having firms make decisions for them.

Social media marketing

The number of worldwide social network users is expected to reach 3.09 billion monthly active users by 2021. Global internet users spend some 136 minutes per day surfing social networks. When considering social media marketing, four questions should be considered to help boost marketing:

1. What are your goals?

• Test ideas
• Create awareness
• Build anticipation for new products and services
• Identify your metrics for success

2. Which platforms should we be using?

• Understanding of your customer’s identity and preferences
• Different social platforms appeal to different demographics
• The same logic applies to geography

3. What is your content strategy?

• Your content should be unique, useful and shareable
• If your content is sensitive, your content strategy should take that into consideration

4. Are you ready to talk with your audience – in real time?

• Social media interactions are two way driven by both brands and consumers. So your organization needs to show that it is listening and engaging with questions, concerns and suggestions

New Ways of Shopping

• Augumented Reality

Augmented reality is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities (i.e. visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory, somatosensory).

Chatbots

Chatbots are specifically programmed robots (software) that interact with customers and simulate human conversation through artificial intelligence (AI). It can be used to conduct online chat conversation via text or text-to-speech.