••• retailing
Fact from fiction: 10 myths of multichannel retailing
No doubt technology is changing how consumers behave and it's been a growing challenge for retailers to manage the many mediums being used to shop in stores and online. A global survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers aims to debunk 10 myths of multichannel retailing.
Myth 1: Social media will soon become an indispensable retail channel. On its own, social media isn’t likely to become an important retail channel anytime soon but it is a robust marketing and communications tool.
Myth 2: Stores will become mainly showrooms in the future. Web product research actually drives far more shoppers to make a physical store purchase than vice versa.
Myth 3: The tablet will soon overtake the PC as the preferred online shopping device. While tablets and smartphones are catching up, shoppers are still overwhelmingly using PCs to shop online.
Myth 4: As the world gets smaller, global consumers are getting more alike. Although consumers shop with more global retailers than ever before, there is a wide range of local difference in consumer behaviors.
Myth 5: China is the future model of online retail. China is at the forefront of some key trends but its multichannel and online model is unique.
Myth 6: Domestic retailers will always have a home-field advantage over global retailers. Foreign retailers are making inroads into consumers’ lists of favorite multichannel retailers.
Myth 7: Global online pure players like Amazon will always have a scale advantage over domestic online pure players. Many domestic online pure players are holding their own.
Myth 8: Retailers are inherently better positioned than brands, as they are closest to the customer. Consumers are shopping directly from manufacturers and many no longer distinguish between retailers and their favorite brands.
Myth 9: Online retail is cannibalizing sales in other channels. Consumers are actually spending more with their favorite multichannel retailers, not just shifting some purchases to a different channel.
Myth 10: Low price is the main driver of customer spend at favorite retailers. Customers value quality and innovative brands over price when shopping at their favorite multichannel retailers.
To download a PDF of the PricewaterhouseCoopers study, visit http://tinyurl.com/cpolz3x.
••• consumer psychology
Thin to win? Think again.
To successfully use idealized images in marketing to women, they should be presented subtly, according to a study from Warwick Business School.
The women in the study were put through various experiments including being shown magazine pages that contained different advertisements, one of which was for a vodka. Some women received advertisements that did not feature an attractive model (no exposure), other women received advertisements that had a bikini-clad model on the opposite page to a picture of the vodka (subtle exposure) and the third group had the attractive model on a whole page next to the vodka (blatant exposure).
“When consumers are blatantly exposed to idealized images of thin and beautiful women they are more likely to use a defensive coping strategy to boost self-evaluation by denigrating the pictured woman,” said Tamara Ansons, assistant professor at Warwick Business School. “This can negatively affect the products these models endorse through the transfer of the negative evaluation of the model to the endorsed product.
“However, when subtly exposed to these perfectly-shaped models, it leads to negative self-evaluation but does not interfere with their evaluation of the pictured model. Thus, the generally-positive evaluation of the model leads to a favorable reaction to the product she is endorsing.”