Best Practice for Brand E-Commerce 2018

Digital transformation now days become a hot topic, with many Marketing managers & Entrepreneurs talking about it every day and give significant budget . In the past few years most digital transformation initiatives were by startups & E-commerce companies like flipkart , Amazon , many other about high-end and edgy technologies or solutions.

However, now Digital Transformation ROI has been validated across many industries I , C-Suites are understanding that it is more important to map out the right strategy rather than implementing complex tech solutions.

Let’s take a look from the perspective of branding and marketing. I have been seen Under the latest trend of transformation, “Brand” and “Commerce” have rapidly merged into one term, “Brand Commerce”, a term to describe the narrowing of the gap between brand inspiration and consumer transaction. The concept of Brand Commerce has become the ‘North Star’ for brand marketers & digital marketers when reviewing and evolving their own work and methodologies.

Lets take the example of a brand’s entry in to the Chinese market as we also know Alibaba.com the first E- commerce platform . In today’s climate, the brand will decide on an online and offline channel strategy, and the local brand channel planning teams work together in an agile way for rapid progress. This is the opposite of the linear and separate ways of working in the past.

To be specific, brand positioning in the US , Chinese , Indian market needs to be worked out in response to specific online channel strategies. Online and offline media strategies and campaign planning need to direct data to inform channel planning. When sales begin, media data, sales data and customer membership data needs to be consolidated and analyzed in time for optimizing the next round of brand and commerce strategy. The fast-paced and complicated way of working presents traditional organizations with many challenges.

From my point of view, Brand and Commerce go hand in hand, and have only previously been separated because of traditional ways of working — using digital to reach, communicate and interact with customers in real time.

A great example for this new era is the story of a female entrepreneur, who found out that her company’s reputation was being damaged by other vendors selling fake versions of her products, so she made the decision to invite whoever bought the fake products to store to swap them for genuine products from her company. Not surprisingly, a lot of customers went to the stores. She saved the company’s reputation, won back customers’ hearts and sales grew three times, driven by more store visits.

This story strongly demonstrates the benefit of Brand & Commerce working together. Imagine, if the same situation happened in your company, how long will it take to go through the discussions with the brand team, marketing team, legal team, operation team and channel team?

When developing a digital transformation strategy, is there a way to evaluate how well Brand and Commerce actually work together? This is where the original thinking framework — the Brand Commerce Digital Transformation Matrix — is used as a diagnostics tool for brand and marketing related professionals.