The Octopus and the “Alive Web”
Commerce is nothing new. Retail is nothing new. E-commerce simply superimposed a known purchasing process over a set of technological limitations. Clever retailers learned to distract users from the essential clunkiness of buying online with innovations in CX and the halo of the non-tech shopping experience. Meanwhile, in China, they’ve all but done away with the “traditional” e-commerce user experience in favor of concentrating the transaction into a messaging app window. So, what’s next?
Getting to “what’s next” requires us to abandon incremental improvements and approach these challenges from fresh perspectives. We’ve evolved beyond just wanting to sell things. We want a meaningful relationship with our consumers to help ensure that they will stay with us — and that we will continue to sell them things — over the long term. We may go so far as to leverage consumer relationships to help our brand / retail establishment enter new territory. We know that we can engage in some fairly sophisticated consumer engagement initiatives without a huge budget by having the strategic focus and mental freedom to break away from the drive to the transaction, and embrace the drive to the connection.
Don’t worry, it’s not just you; the fluffiness of that last paragraph made me barf a little. But it’s not untrue. A lot of tech effort has been dedicated to making the e-commerce experience behave so as not to disrupt the delicate path the consumer has been set on. But what if we think more about the consumer experience as a stack of discrete experiences that are not incremental, but are designed to bring people together? Something sharable, perhaps. Such a notion is not at all new, but the imaginations that envisioned it upwards of a decade ago were limited by the technology of the day.
Which brings us to this question: Do you know the difference between ‘arm’ and ‘tentacle’?
It’s Not The Size That Counts, It’s the Distribution
The octopus has about 500 million neurons, with more than half of them found outside its main brain. Octopus arms have suckers along most of their length, as opposed to tentacles, which have suckers only near their ends. Each of the octopus’s arms has a small cluster of nerve cells that controls movement, so the creature technically has eight independent mini-brains along with a larger central brain. Incredibly adaptable and clever, the octopus: They have no real weapons except brains and ink, and so they engage with what’s happening around them in ways that are eye-opening. And that’s the key: They rely on their decentralized centers of intelligence to leverage their surroundings, to achieve their goals.
Sure, they die right after procreating, but you can’t be everything…
To see why this serves as a very handy way to envision how e-commerce should evolve, we turn to the writings of Om Malik, the accomplished (and very cerebral) Silicon Valley journalist / entrepreneur / venture capitalist:
“It has been over a decade since I first talked about the “alive web.” The pervasive connectivity and increasing number of network connections excited me then (and still does).”
The blog post this came from discusses the great failed experiment of Google+, its potential for fostering greater connections between people, and even mentioned Chatroulette (which, unbelievably, still exists). But this post also leans heavily on an earlier post of his, which shows both his continuity of thought and that we are always solving the same problem, over and over again:
“What matters is the connection and the interactions. We get online to socialize instead of posting status updates, just as we would when we would go to our favorite club or a neighborhood bar.”
The notion of fostering greater connections between people has the potential to profoundly impact how we approach e-commerce today. When our focus turns away from the race to the transaction and more toward providing a venue where people can connect in real time to co-experience something, we form the basis of a relationship.
Thanks in some part to COVID lockdowns, the ”how” part of creating these opportunities for connecting is less problematic than ever. If we imagine a marketing and commerce automation “system” where the central functions of e-commerce are decentralized and can operate semi-independently (like the brains of an octopus) we can customize the experience for the consumer, expand the collection of shopper preferences for the brand without intrusion, and broaden the ability to upsell / cross-sell for the retailer. Siloing the steps of an online transaction within one system neither guarantees security nor brings efficiencies to anybody except, perhaps, the tech team. And, most crucially, siloed systems do not align with how people behave online today.
Stack? Suite? Zoom?
To be fair, for years purpose-built e-commerce systems that support a truly direct customer engagement have existed. They are architected around a core capability, and then, through a series of “acquire-and-bolt-on” acquisitions, become a part of a disparate set of capabilities presented as a single solution. They are merchandised as a “suite” of “connected” services. They tended to cost more because — without anything else equally capable — they did more. You then adapted your business to the suite’s offering, not to the habits of the consumer.
You were not being an octopus.
In a world of expanded and growing data freedom, the limitations of this thinking becomes immediately apparent. Every time each of us picks up our mobile device we are leapfrogging between data sources and repositories. The act of sharing a Snapchat over WhatsApp seems perfectly normal, but it links two highly competitive services, each with their own data systems. Each sells access to “their own” audiences to advertisers, and uses “their own” audience engagement metrics to lure more creators to their platforms. What they do not do is collaborate to make things better for the end user. Imagine Microsoft, Adobe and Google announcing that their respective suites of business apps now integrate completely interchangeably with each other, enabling the end user to work in whichever environment feels best, and then export to whichever format works best. (Cue hysterical laughter…)
Unless a corporation or government specifically blocks a particular application or account, the essence of consumer behavior today is to go where the experience or answer — the data — is and bring it to where you need it. With this in mind, let’s return to our daily lives. As I am writing this, the rules around working from home vary across Brasil with the distinction between “telework” and “home office” being more about tax treatment than employer mandate. Nevertherless, the transformation of your spare bedroom / living room / kitchen table into a video-linked studio is the new reality: According to Compre&Confie, furniture categories in the e-commerce sector reached as much as BRL 1.5 billion in revenues (about $ 278 million) during May and June 2020, a growth rate of 196.1% year-over-year. In the same period AliExpress reported that webcams were among its fastest growing product categories.
Some of the fears about the blurred lines between “work” and “not at work” also bring benefits that consumers enjoy: We can use those same webcams and multi-participant capabilities to link with friends and family members in group chats. And we do. So why couldn’t we also repurpose those same capabilities to host a buying party, where a brand or retailer can showcase items and answer questions? It’s simple to envision:
- Invite a select group of your best customers to bring friends with shared interests in a category of products
- Hold a “private showing”
- Cap it at 8 people — or whatever makes the most sense
- Make the “emcee” be one of your best salespeople — joined by a senior-level brand executive
- Make the private showing about the product not the transaction
- Share links to PDPs in the chat if appropriate
- Gather e-mail addresses to add to the mailing list
- Send personalized follow-ups
This is an example in its simplest form. The construct of the event can happen any number of ways, but the point is that none of this requires an expensive, dedicated suite of connected capabilities. Since Zoom (and MS teams and FaceTime and WhatsApp and HouseParty and others) have figured out how to do fully duplexed audio/video with screen and file sharing, and they provide these capabilities as (in most instances) a free download, we have what we need. Apple has built into the latest FaceTime API something they call SharePlay, where multiple people can watch the same movie or enjoy the same game hosted by a single person in the group. It’s the realization of the vision Mr. Malik referred to as the “alive web” by aggregating smaller solutions in a nimble way to create the right brand and transactional environments to deliver a connected social commerce experience.
Stranger-to-Stranger Engagements and the Dentist
The “alive web” is a powerful guiding principle for the future of e-commerce because it gets to the heart of what people like to do most when online: Connect with others. Truly compelling online retail experiences won’t happen by faithfully reproducing the in-store experience online. Nor will they happen by seamlessly blending technology with the in-store experience (the current trend in high-end retail). They will happen when the clever ones among us figure out how to merge the activities that people want to do with those they can do, to deliver a new experience that gives consumers something that feels familiar but is still new. The notion of the “alive web” becomes our North Star in this effort.
CRM is regarded as the brain of the company’s engagement strategies and capabilities. There are all sorts of KPIs under the purview of CRM that reinforce this notion, including many that we have shared in this column and in Forum Ecommerce Brasil meetings: RFM, LTV, and others. But the consumer interaction that actually matters takes place far away from CRM, usually between 2 people who may be familiar (conversations that lead to recommendations) or may not know each other at all (product ratings & reviews, Internet influencers and other stranger-to-stranger engagements). CRM’s role is, at best, like that of a dentist: The guiding force against cavities beforehand and the solution to the problem after the fact, but not present when the series of activities that caused the cavity to form took place.
We can more quickly and organically deliver that impactful consumer experience by decentralizing the functions that deliver consumer experience and distribute the experience across relevant sub-functions. We then collect the consumer’s preferences (engagement, sharing, downloads, purchasing) and use them to drive strategies for media placement, merchandising, messaging, etc. We remain far away from this approach given the state of today’s marketing thinking, but the capabilities needed to realize this goal are at our fingertips. CRM doesn’t have to be the sole driver of engagement any more than an e-commerce application must be the one and only place where a transaction takes place. This is not my opinion, it is already happening with, for instance, the rise of social commerce.
Evolving our thinking on this means taking the notion of 1:1 consumer engagement at scale and delivering it as an opportunity to build (or re-build) communities of like-minded people. This is what is known in CRM terms as “segmentation.” These communities are not, in fact, segments. They simply self-select and convene on the best available platform that facilitates unfettered interaction, which is where the cavities start to happen.
What to do next becomes pretty self-evident: Stop trying to herd consumers through your process, and start learning how to operate within theirs. Refashion your strategic approach to participate in the channels that make sense today. Many retailers and brands hold as sacred the in-person, “show-me” experience. Zoom and FaceTime and others have delivered the best-available proxy for that, breaking down the boundaries of opening hours, dealing with crowds, and finding a place to park your car. We are no longer dealing with scenarios that are easy to imagine but difficult (expensive) to make real. A virtual buying party is just one example. You are probably already thinking of others.
The Web is Alive
Survey the people with whom you are in regular contact. When you say “web,” I suspect most people think “browser”. Maybe some of the more tech-savvy include “apps” in there. But they’re all selling it short. The web is people. The point Mr. Malik made was technologies that do a better job of enabling people to connect — the alive web — are the ones that excite him most, both intellectually and as an investor. As a marketer and e-commerce practitioner we can become caught up in systems, technologies and the treatment of data. People, on the other hand, do not respect the boundaries that systems impose.
In some of our earlier conversations we have discussed the notion of model innovation, where you evaluate and evolve your business model with urgency and motivation caused by the threat of a worthy adversary: Yourself. The pandemic should have had this effect on your business. With the forced adoption of new behaviors on pretty much everyone, nobody should have been standing still. The notion of the alive web, and the range of available capabilities to help you make this happen, are all there. An octopus sees things this way.
So should you.
This post will / has appeared in E-Commerce Brasil magazine in late 2021, but in Portuguese…
