Stuck in the past: why traditional retail brands are struggling with social e-commerce

The market for direct to consumer-brands (D2C) is changing rapidly, and has forced brands to rethink traditional marketing strategies and their overall customer approach. However, these changes have proven to be difficult for larger, more established brands. Here, investor Eamonn Carey speaks about the challenges of growing a D2C brand today.

Leaving tradition behind: the challenges for legacy brands

How will traditional retail brands survive in a new, eclectic and digital world? Many brands face challenges involving moving their businesses into the digital era. Eamonn Carey , investor and partner at Tera Ventures , believes that this problem is rooted in the ways these organizations are structured – from marketing to internal processes.?

– It’s harder for brands to move downstream from retail to e-commerce, just by the way they are set up. We live in a very different world, but these brands think that if they just put up a website with a buy now-button, the customers will discover them the same way they discovered them when they had a store on Oxford Street in London.

Many people believe in the idea of “If we build it, the customers will come”. This is not the case, according to Carey. In order to succeed you need to have a very compelling product as well as a reason for people to come to your website.?

– And when you have acquired a customer, you need to think about how to retain that person and how to build a relationship with them that is not just sending them endless transactional emails.?

Successful D2C-brands embrace change, build communities and produce stellar content

According to Eamonn Carey, the best D2C-brands focus on content marketing and community building efforts. Brands need to think about how to integrate the community aspect to the online shopping experience, rather than just building a website encouraging people to buy products without giving them a reason to do so.?

– The best consumer brands that I've worked with, and the ones that I’m a customer of, are brands that have really thought about that community aspect to what they’re doing. It’s a site where you go to actually read some information, their blog posts and have a conversation with them in general.?

When failing to conform to these new standards, many big companies solve the problem by buying smaller brands that have succeeded in creating engaging online customer experiences.?

– Not only are they buying a successful brand, they’re also buying the know-how, the knowledge and the connection that those brands have with their consumers. They then hope that it will filter through into their wider organization. While large companies have enviable revenue streams, I think that in the next 20 years those brands will be disrupted by someone else coming in that has a more unique relationship with their consumers and a more tailored product.

Stackend is a Swedish SaaS Service that enables Shopify store owners to offer their customers an immersive social shopping experience with live shopping connected to YouTube, vast community features, and smart tools to work with influencers. Once connected to your store Stackend also lets you create virtual pop-up stores with your products and have them appear in blogs, articles, or even ad systems – with full shopping and checkout functionality for their visitors.