Online vs offline shopping boundaries disappear for the consumer
Brands will shift significant spend to promotions and other mobile communications to reach their customers.
- January 2013
- Eric Hazan
Authors
In 2013, e-commerce will become a major purchase channel for a large number of product categories that have resisted the push so far, such as home decoration, cosmetics, and furniture. Online-only stores like Amazon will continue to grow, but mobile will become an important weapon in the brick & mortar arsenal to win customers in 2013. That’s because mobile devices — tablets and smartphones — will eliminate the online/offline boundaries for consumers. With a mobile device at their side, shoppers won’t make the online/offline distinction. Given this emerging reality, look for retail companies to stay more or less flat in TV advertising, reduce spend in traditional media, and shift funds to digital media, particularly mobile promotions. Companies are already realizing that offline promotions are becoming an increasingly less productive way to connect with customers.
Mobile devices, however, are becoming the way people interact with brands, especially in Europe where 73 percent of surveyed shoppers use them to search for a product from home, and 42 percent do it while in a store. As shoppers use their smartphones in store to check prices, for example, stores will shoot a coupon to them to bridge the gap in prices offered by other stores as a way to keep their sale (65 percent of surveyed shoppers either put off a purchase or change stores after doing a price check). And what about mobile payments? That will be a big disruption, but I don’t think we’ll see it at scale until 2014.
Next outlook for 2013: CMO owns the growth agenda
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