Neuromarketing, Branding & Ecommerce
Why Your E-Commerce Store Must Have an Emotional Connection with Your Customers
Just Having a Website Full of Products Isn’t Enough These Days
Own and operate (or considering the launch of a new ecommerce) business? You’re in good company. Last checked, ecommerce is the booming side of retail and there’s no indication the upward trend is going to change. If segmented as an industry, e-commerce is responsible for about $2 trillion in annual sales revenue. Specifically, worldwide B2C e-commerce sales reached $1.7 trillion in 2015, and it is estimated to reach $2.35 trillion by 2018.
This figure and shear growth alone is enticing to those considering “setting up shop”, but in overwhelming fashion, the odds of winning the ecommerce race out of the gates in the absence of any real brand-strategy, connecting your products to your end-customer is (to put it mildly), an art, and it takes a certain brand-ethos to build, create, and sustain that connection.
How Do You Differentiate Yourself in a Boundless Sea of Online Stores?
While ecommerce-platform juggernauts (such as Shopify, for example) do not callout their effective churn rates, that is to say, they do not disclose the number of new online stores that fail or don’t actually earn revenue, and inevitably shut down. It’s a widely known truth, however that approximately 96% of businesses fail within their first ten years (online or otherwise), regardless of industry.
Certainly, there are multiple factors at play including volatile markets, supply chain restrictions, an ever-changing and shape-shifting global economy (to generalize of course), but this post isn’t about those external factors. No, quite the opposite actually. It's as intimate as a personal conversation.
It’s about the connection between your products and your end-consumer.
For those digital marketplace-mavens who’ve built a business atop drop-shipping models with little-to-no customization of an out-of-the-box template, this may be of some importance. Generally speaking, how does a product, brand or store stand out?
Taking this a step further, how do customers emotionally-connect with your product?
To kickoff the 2017 holiday season, Nordstrom launched its “Love, Nordstrom” holiday campaign for the second year in a row, which spans across all marketing and brand collateral, from the website to outdoor ads, to of course online video and its website. To most marketers, this play makes sense. It's somehow obvious, but it works, and why is no surprise. The purpose of the example though, is to expand on “why it makes sense”, and furthermore, how this thinking and ethos can help build your online-brand and business persona.
Long story short, this communication and "brand packaging” matters to consumers.
Consumers desire a connection with brands and what better time to build that connection than during the holidays. There’s an inherent emotional connection during the season itself which is why retailers have relied so heavily on holiday-shopping promotions to determine annual success. The opportunity to end the year strong is a powerful force for retailers across the board, so why not capitalize when given the chance.
Capitalization by way of endless holiday promotions without substance though, is a fool’s chore.
Beyond the Holiday Shopping Season
Huggies offers a great example of connecting with consumers every day of the year. They developed the Huggies Rewards Club, specifically designed to target, attract and educate new parents.
Altogether, it’s a fully-connected experience that (once users create an account), can access loads of helpful and useful information regardless if the user’s child is a Huggies-baby.
It’s a timeless example of being a servant to your customers and building brand-loyalty through support, education and connectivity.
Switching brand-gears entirely, Burberry maintains a variety of unique micro-sites where customers share snapshots of themselves in their own Burberry coats or other accessories, then also streams unique, exclusive content (fashion shows for users of its mobile app).
Per the “Art of the Trench” example, Burberry explains: Art of the Trench is a living document of the trench coat and the people who wear it. The project is a collaboration between you, Burberry and some of the world's leading image makers. The call to action on this page is simply “Upload your trench”, no other pop-ups or announcements. It’s simply an ode to the brand and those who enjoy it, and furthermore want to show off their brand-pride.
The Psychology of “Why” Consumers Buy
In 2008, Martin Lindstrom published a well-received book entitled “buy•ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy”, which was a unique and lofty, albeit fact-backed, approach to marketing and advertising — one that I wish was available when I was in college.
Moreover, it presents scientific evidence linked to our emotional responses and answers to why some advertising campaigns and products “connect” with an audience and others do not, or at least, not as well.
The book addresses well known brands as well as campaign tactics, even reasoning as to the ineffectiveness of PSA-type deterrent-marketing (i.e. Outdoor ads of diseased lungs to deter folks from lighting up a cigarette, among others).
The research and overall data stems from his push to bridge the gap between brand-to-consumer connectedness and the science behind it, utilizing fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanners and slew (thousands) of volunteers over a number of years.
To simplify dramatically, fMRI measures blood and oxygen flow to various elements of the brain, and utilizing what is currently known of the brain (the mapping of which parts control various elements and emotional responses), and finally drawing conclusions and correlations to customers’ affinity toward an array of marketing-messaging among well known products.
The research suggests (and more or less backs up) the notion that we align ourselves with brands that evoke a sentiment, an emotion and an overall feeling about the brands we buy or companies we interact with.
It speaks to why a sales professional at a dealership is incredibly anxious to get you in a car and test-drive it. There’s a kinesthetic connection that occurs when you’re in the driver’s seat. It also speaks to why once in that “driver’s seat” of any product, a relationship or bond has been formed.
Call it the puppy-dog, take-home close or the test-drive factor, but touching and possessing is a powerful element of in-store activities — so, how do we recreate that brand interaction online?
Speaking beyond test-driving cars at this point; trying on a sweater or a pair of pants at Nordstrom is more than the simplicity of the article of clothing you're fit-testing.
The Intimacy of Brand Connectedness
Speaking more towards the psychology of brand-loyalty. There’s also a close link of intimacy with brands that were consumers’ “first” of an individual product-type. There’s an emotional reason advertisers and marketers over the years have relied on concepts for brands that have “been used by my family for generations; my mother used Tide, and my grandmother before her”.
First car brand, first beer, first techy-toy. Take a moment to think about a brand that you were attached to at a young age. Were you one of the millions of adolescents who were extremely attached to their Sony Walkman in the 80s/90s as your first lifestyle-gadget, and as a result, perhaps trusted the brand for its other technological offers over the years (TVs, Stereos, PlayStation)?
That continuity and trust doesn’t exist for all brands, and in some cases, it may be built up and lost over time if a company fails to maintain the level of appeal. Even Apple, for all of its glory around innovation and brand loyalty, has lost many customers to competitors with similar products. Point being, brand loyalty isn’t a perfect recipe, and it certainly is not set in stone.
That being said, I find myself almost going out of my way to give a non-Apple example on exemplary brand-loyalty. It's tough though to come up with better examples, because whether or not you're a fan of Apple products has little bearing on the longstanding case study they've become.
Your Brand is More than a Name.
Your Products are More than a SKU.
The mission: create the psychological bond between your e-commerce brand and your customers.
Sure, having a flashy e-commerce site, chock-full of products with rich, edge-to-edge HD images may attract users (many Shopify templates offer a modern look-and-feel out of the box), and your store may eventually even net a profit, but if you’re in e-commerce for the long-haul and are looking to grow a brand, customer loyalty and an essence of any kind, you must create a culture, create a brand and a mission, then grow the business from there.
You will find that when you address the brand culture and mission (assuming there is one) associated with your brand, you’ll be able to build messaging with meaning, instead of content for the sake of content around your products.
