A Digital Flagship Experience
Used more loosely, a Flagship is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the first, largest, fastest, most heavily armed, or best known. To set the record straight, a Digital Flagship Experience is not a website, thats merely 10% of the whole experience.
This can be directly relatable to your product services and offerings. As a brand, which channel will you position to become your Flagship experience? Given the digital purchasing trends, a Digital First Flagship store would be laying down the foundation for your future success.
At first glance, how is a retail store perceived by a customer ? What do customers expect from a retail store? What appeals to them? And conversely: How can the retailer arouse their enthusiasm? Once acquiring the answers to these questions and thus understanding the customer, the last question remains: How can digital solutions not only incubate but also develop a sustainable customer relationship for retailers?
Yes, time is a precious commodity - if not the most precious in today’s fast paced world. It is therefore easy to assume that customers would like technological solutions in retail stores.Think about it, how many times have you often become impatient waiting in a long queue just to check out your purchases? Today’s customers are no longer willing to accept digital weak spots in the bricks-and mortar shop environment. Customers nowadays are willing to even change the brand that they have been loyal to for years-on-end in order to shy away from archaic means of purchasing retail goods.
However there is a misconception that consumers want everything, faster. Speed is indeed of essence but it does not represent the whole pie. Consumers want the right product at the most convenient time, at the highest possible quality and all through the most accessible platform. The diagram below highlights how consumers want to receive updates from retail outlets:
Back in April, the company Onest conducted a study based around the digital flagship phenomenon in retail and have been studying the trends for ever since. They investigated the interaction at the intersections within a store and its digital presence. It is not surprising that different age groups have different expectations of the retail sector. Here are some insights:
- As expected, younger customers who live in faster worlds compared to their predecessors responded to an improved shopping experience through digitalisation within the store;
- Older customers in general would wish for a better exchange with the sales staff.
- It is a given that most of Generation Z time is spent on researching products online rather than exploring in-store. They would know what to find in the store before actually stepping foot into it.
This goes in line with the efficiency aspect of purchasing goods. You research, you go to the store, find the specific premeditated product, grab it, buy it and you’re off. This means that unless the retailer manages to offer this offline and online link to these cohorts, then surely, it will lose them.
The Bricks-and-mortar aspect can not be forgotten. It is crucial to find common ground between the former and the digital world by creating an interlinked shopping strategy. The best way would be to develop a platform which will link the appliances and integrate the digital systems into the store environment and simultaneously provide optimal support for the customer. In the modern retail world, the idea of a “perfect” store resonates a combination of attractive, in-store experiences coinciding with digital interaction.
The future stores, then product or service based will require a complete transformation. The focus will no longer be on the brick and mortar outlets but digital mobile first with a seamless behind the scenes operation.
"It's a fact, winning companies accelerated profitability during and after the recession, while losers stalled. Coming out of the last recession, the strongest companies went on offence early, while many of their peers focused on survival and waited for the cycle to clear. " - Bain & Company, Inc
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