Walmart dropped 10% on profit warnings, Shopify laid off 10% of its employees, and the Fed hiked interest rates by 0.75% this summer (that’s billions of new interest payments on current and future debt). ). There’s a lot of pessimism in the macroeconomic world right now, but not everywhere, as Coke and McDonald’s showed strong quarterly reports this summer.
But a recession is looming over the horizon (or already here, by definition), and inflation is hitting sales and quarterly reports. e-marketer “If 2020 was a massive digital acceleration and 2021 was a brick-and-mortar rebound, then 2022 growth for both brick-and-mortar and e-commerce looks less impressive by comparison.”
Forecasts for non-commercial sales this year are expected to increase by approximately 6%. This is 100 basis points above the average annual growth rate of the last decade. Still growing, but not big. Current projections put e-commerce growth at around 10%, which would be his lowest YOY since 2009.
Hence the short version. There’s a lot more volatility out there than we’ve seen since the Great Recession, and e-commerce was still in its infancy at the time for many, so this is uncharted territory. We need to change and transform to survive, and innovation is the sextant to the sunny sea.
As a 25-year veteran of digital commerce, I know these conditions can lead companies to act hastily, invest quickly, and lose sight of their larger goals. FutureCommerce’s Step By Step podcast on the topic that if brands, retailers, and indeed all digital commerce companies are to succeed in today’s market, he must address three strategic challenges: I was lucky enough to speak.
Is your company setting the right targets?
The software industry got it right. They work backwards towards an agreed endpoint. Amazon tenant. Everything is done that way. Many software companies follow this, but many brands do not. Often they begin with a reaction to something that has happened. And their perceived response to that builds the program.
Brands and retailers are really struggling with the amount of data they generate and they’re taking huge amounts of data lakes and mining them to find all this cool information and then go down all these different rabbit holes You have to dig. But what they should do is, instead of starting with the data and moving forward towards defining his KPIs, they should start with the KPIs in mind and work backwards to get the data to tell them how to get there. to find out.
Is your current partner ecosystem aligned with your goals?
Why is this important? I say this both from sitting on the client side of the table hiring agencies, and from working at agencies where agencies and tech partners bring their culture and work style to your company’s endeavours. Part of an agency’s job is to make a difference in its organization. that is their responsibility. We talk about what we do while working with people as partners and it is holistic and designed to support the goals of the end customer.
Having worked for large agencies and big name trading companies over the course of my career, I have a big vendor mindset. If your solution says commerce, you have a price tag that says $1 million, you scan the barcode and say, “Thank you, please proceed.” There are some agencies that are one solution shops. They specialize in one CRM or a particular experience suite. As a result, the brands and retailers that hire those companies are guided in a particular direction and don’t make judgments about it.
However, this direction is often solution-oriented rather than objective-oriented. Aligning on a short-term problem-solving approach is easy, but developing a common language and common goals to achieve your company’s customer goals is much harder. Forrester recommends reading a new study called this “common cause.” A company that achieves this is more likely to grow he by 20% or more than a novice. Not only should strategic partnerships be agreed upon, but it can also be used to create your own engagement model. Do not allow your business to become an agency customer. We must work together in partnership to meet the needs of your commerce customers.
How involved is your organization in innovation planning?
When interacting with digital commerce companies, I often ask, “Why are you making the decisions you’re making today, why are you doing these things?” Then you can get to the root of why they are doing this, externally or internally, and find better ways to do it. is required.
The downside of all these tools being ubiquitous and available to virtually everyone to some degree is that they are all like nails, walking around with a hammer and trying to find a place to use them. , which often leads brands and companies to go insane and make hasty decisions. They could have bought a Toyota Corolla, but they went out to buy that red sports car. To make matters worse, the car remains in the garage due to organizational silos.
When companies tell me all about their challenges, we have to face it.The only unity of all your problems is you.But that’s not always the answer. .Looking at the end goal “By this date, I want to achieve X sales for X people.” great goal. It is amazing! Let’s work backwards from it, as opposed to the reactive statement of “Well, my rival is doing X, so I have to do X.”
The more mature the organization, the less responsive the company. Between reacting, learning from things, acting on what you know, learning from things, anticipating things, and acting on what you think will happen. There is a big gap. And there are very few brands to the left of that model.
Jumping over that hurdle is the path to success and the way brands get back to their innovations. They often find that there are several steps to innovating in order to set the right goals and gain the maturity to complete the innovation cycle. Companies need to own and collaborate on their innovation processes. They cannot outsource or do it alone. Strategic partnerships are important. We must work together to succeed.
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Involving all key groups is essential to delivering true innovation and setting the company up for success in the next five years. This allows brands and retailers to establish a common language, accountability and necessary innovation framework. Bounteous works with companies to successfully deploy co-innovation methodologies to deliver the critical insights needed to plan, the highly personalized marketing and execution needed to sell, and the right data, technology and talent to execute. , and developing methods. Recruitment across the organization is critical to setting common goals, maximizing strategic and technical partnerships, and realizing the true goal of selling more products to satisfied customers.
