What will the finale look like? This question, perhaps, is keeping Souq, Noon and other online retailers awake. With Amazon’s blazing entry into the Middle East market, 2017 is set to become the year where ecommerce competition gets racked up by another notch.
Across the UAE, especially, many new start-ups are making a debut and established brick-and-mortar brands are augmenting strategies to achieve significant chunks of the ecommerce market as millennial consumers increasingly move online. But the battle for the Middle East e-commerce market is about much more than retailing.
The entry of myriad players has made the space competitive, pushing a majority of Tier I and II brands in the technology space to explore additional value propositions. It could be a platform that can provide focus (avoiding the marketplace clutter), a unique consumer engagement model and new tools to reclaim customer relationship.
A lot of the marketing budget is now being channelised in the online segment to spread the word of the brand. And its products-as clicks have clearly overtaken footfalls. More and more, brands are looking at compelling online narratives instead of a mere listing in a marketplace.
What has taken precedence is the search for platforms that offer a unique ability to engage with consumers at a more personal level rather than simply peddling a product to grow customer engagement and brand affinity.
Keeping abreast with the changing dynamics, brands are now increasingly putting innovation at the core of their marketing strategies. Within this realm, consumer confidence, return on investment, creation of experiential stores digitally, and brand awareness are the key areas of interest to shift the business forward. Consequently, established and emerging brands are taking note — and evaluating the merits of going direct-to-consumer.
Although a majority of digital marketing initiatives and e-commerce ventures are directed towards making the brands accessible to a larger retail audience, the gamechanger going forward will be the cultivation of community advocates that endorse/recommend products and services using social media.
To cultivate a continued sense of community across a brand’s product offering, integrating social is key. This empowers interactivity on and away from your site, allowing users to promote products and services and share their experience, thereby strengthening your reach and voice. Welcoming consumer feedback, featuring user-generated photos on websites and brands’ social media feeds is an effective way to connect with those consumers who are skipping commercials, blocking online ads and generally ignoring anything that resembles traditional advertising.
These tactics are not only cheaper and faster than creating a traditional marketing campaign, but also popular in maintaining customer loyalty in the digital age.
The implied recommendation aspect is not only important for lead-generation, but icentral to community-building as users can engage one another to form a collective identity around your brand.
So, ecommerce ventures can benefit a lot more if they realize the importance of an engagement-model, and listen to what people are talking about them. One cannot deny that people want to try out better brands, better products and new services, but they hardly have any knowledge that many such exist beyond the tier-I category.
And that’s what ecommerce platforms need to do. They need to educate about brands in the mid-income segment using a creative canvas of sorts: integrated storytelling, immersive videos, encouraging key people with huge follower counts to upload photos on social media and provide round-the-clock top-notch after-sale services.
There’s a huge market to be plugged in the affordable income category, provided online platforms strike long-term partnerships with brands and offering them focus, recognition and an online affinity.
Every year, new trends take shape in the ecommerce space; trends that most e-tailers consider will improve their business and position them for greater immediate and long-term success. In reality, though, it would be prudent for retailers to follow that tried and tested maxim: trends come and go, but business relationships are eternal.
For this region, it will be interesting to see how the e-commerce battle unfolds. For consumers, in the interim, it would be wise to make the best of the big sales being run by online retailers to capture eyeballs and retain consumer loyalty.
The sale will last only until an undisputed leader emerges! Or as retailers like to put it, “only till stocks last”.
The writer is the CEO of Whoopey.com.
