As retailing mixes with the social web, where consumers interact more with brands as well as one another, retailers that open their brands to shoppers with interactive web sites will build stronger customer relationships and sales, Kelly Mooney said in the first keynote address at Shop.org’s Annual Summit in Las Vegas this week.
“The Internet is a great enabler of the open brand,” said Mooney, who is president and chief experience officer of Resource Interactive, a web site design and marketing firm. Compared to closed brands that target consumers by pushing a marketing monologue their way, open brands develop communities of consumers and conduct a dialogue with them through web sites that foster the sharing of ideas and images related to the retailer’s products, she added, noting that consumers are creating more than 1 billion pages of web content a year.
Referring to her recently published book, “The Open Brand,” which she co-authored with Nita Rollins, director of thought leadership at Resource Interactive, Mooney said retailers should think of “open” as an acronym standing for on-demand, personal, engaging and networked. In other words, retailers should find ways to capitalize on the social web by supporting the interest of consumers to generate and share on the web content related to the retailer’s brand.
Mooney pointed to Diesel, the online and store retailer of youth-oriented apparel and accessories, as a merchant who had increased awareness of its brand when it supported a blogger who had become known for a wild dance routine in an online video that featured Diesel jeans. Compared to another well-known brand that failed to recognize or interact with a popular blogger that had posted content online about its brand—and wound up losing that blogger as a brand advocate—Diesel took a more proactive role in engaging the jeans blogger, Mooney said, suggesting that retailers can take such steps as contributing to a blogger’s discussion group.
Retailers should also consider experimenting with providing new ways to engage consumers on their branded e-commerce sites, such as showing them how to post product reviews and photos, Mooney said. Photos submitted by consumers often put a product in a more meaningful context for other consumers, compared to photos produced in a studio by the retailer or manufacturer, she added.
Five reasons to open up a brand this way, she said, are increasing revenue, getting more use out of assets, gaining early insight into what consumers think and desire, increasing relevance to consumers, and building relationships with consumers who become advocates of a brand. In effect, opening up a brand to consumer participation can reduce marketing costs while increasing traffic to a merchant’s offline as well as online stores, she added.
Many retailers are beginning to see the value of having an open brand strategy, according to an impromptu survey Mooney took of her Shop.org audience. After asking retailers in the audience to text-message her about where they stood vis-ŕ-vis having an open brand, she announced the results: Closed brand, 15%; mostly closed, 26%; beginning to grasp open strategy, 29%; starting to open, 23%; and open, 7%.
Shop.org is the online retailing unit of the National Retail Federation, the retail industry trade group.
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