Personalisation powers emotional connections with fashion consumers

Retail may be a mil­len­nia-old indus­try that every human inter­acts with on a dai­ly basis, but most of the evo­lu­tion in the way peo­ple expe­ri­ence it has occurred in the last cou­ple of decades through dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion. The biggest seg­ment of retail, fash­ion, has his­tor­i­cal­ly relied most on fos­ter­ing an emo­tion­al con­nec­tion with con­sumers, leav­ing mar­keters fac­ing the great­est obsta­cles in emu­lat­ing the feel­ing peo­ple get when they enter a store, but online.

Where­as, pre­vi­ous­ly, con­ve­nience was the main bat­tle­ground for achiev­ing com­pet­i­tive advan­tage in the fash­ion econ­o­my – try­ing to make it as easy as pos­si­ble for con­sumers to find and buy the clothes that demon­strate their per­son­al­i­ty – that is no longer the case in a dig­i­tal world where con­sumers can dis­cov­er and buy any­thing from any­where at any time. Instead, brands and retail­ers now com­pete on the emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence that dri­ves loy­al­ty.

“Fash­ion is about feel­ing good when you’re mak­ing that pur­chase,” says Ivan Mazour, CEO and founder of Ome­tria, a cus­tomer data and mar­ket­ing plat­form that pow­ers the mar­ket­ing of hun­dreds of retail­ers. “You paint a pic­ture in your own mind about the per­son you will be once you’re wear­ing that item of cloth­ing. That is the com­pet­i­tive land­scape for fash­ion retail­ers today. It’s no longer about being able to cre­ate a prod­uct or sup­ply a prod­uct. It’s about being able to cre­ate an expe­ri­ence, a mem­o­ry and a future vision of the indi­vid­ual.

“A mem­o­ry is cre­at­ed when some­thing spe­cial hap­pens or makes us feel under­stood and val­i­dat­ed. In the phys­i­cal world, back in the day, that would hap­pen because your tai­lor, for instance, would know you and remem­ber what you like. That expe­ri­ence feels good because you have a sense of being heard and sin­gled out. Through the tran­si­tion to dig­i­tal, fash­ion retail­ers have had to fig­ure out how they can cre­ate that kind of expe­ri­ence online.”

The Covid-19 pan­dem­ic has only served to accel­er­ate this land­scape, with lock­downs show­ing fash­ion retail­ers, many for the first time, what it’s like to oper­ate in a pure­ly dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment. The most suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies piv­ot­ed quick­ly, turn­ing to tech­nol­o­gy to pro­vide insights that pre­vi­ous­ly came through in-per­son inter­ac­tions. What do peo­ple want to buy? What do they look at but don’t end up buy­ing? What are they return­ing and why? In a dig­i­tal world, this spreads fur­ther to what emails are being opened and adverts clicked.

All of these dif­fer­ent touch­points are a win­dow into the minds of dig­i­tal cus­tomers, but retail­ers have to be care­ful how they go about it. An obtru­sive pop-up that asks peo­ple what they’re inter­est­ed in is not a good expe­ri­ence. Instead, con­sumers expect brands to sim­ply learn from their online behav­iour, in a GDPR-com­pli­ant way that doesn’t abuse their pri­va­cy, and then use that infor­ma­tion to cre­ate a per­son­alised expe­ri­ence that is tai­lored to them.

“That is absolute­ly pos­si­ble in today’s world, ful­ly dig­i­tal and ful­ly online, and it’s already hap­pen­ing,” says Mazour. “Not only are the top fash­ion retail brands increas­ing­ly doing it, but it is now becom­ing the require­ment to sur­vive and thrive. It is the com­pet­i­tive land­scape. Either you do that or nobody will come to your web­site and nobody will click and buy again.”

Ome­tria is a cus­tomer data and mar­ket­ing plat­form that allows retail­ers to con­nect the dots, from under­stand­ing the cus­tomer all the way through to cre­at­ing a mem­o­rable expe­ri­ence that gets them to come back. It enables com­pa­nies to increase cus­tomer rev­enue by send­ing per­son­alised, rel­e­vant mar­ket­ing mes­sages through­out the cus­tomer jour­ney.

The plat­form is pow­ered by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), which is cru­cial giv­en there is no longer a way of cre­at­ing mem­o­rable expe­ri­ences online by rely­ing on man­u­al log­ic and lega­cy sys­tems. A typ­i­cal lega­cy approach cre­at­ed a small num­ber of semi-demo­graph­ic data seg­ment audi­ences and sent a slight­ly dif­fer­ent mes­sage to each one. Instead of 10 mil­lion peo­ple see­ing the same mes­sage, 10 groups of a mil­lion peo­ple saw slight­ly dif­fer­ent ones.

This approach does not achieve the out­come that fash­ion brands want to cre­ate today. Cru­cial­ly, it’s not what the lead­ing com­pa­nies are now doing, which means there is no pre-AI world that a fash­ion brand can go back to if they want to sur­vive. Only a piece of AI that can trans­late a brand vision and objec­tives into 10 mil­lion dif­fer­ent unique expe­ri­ences can deliv­er on the com­pet­i­tive advan­tages nec­es­sary to thrive in the dig­i­tal
econ­o­my today.

Human mar­keters still have to be in charge, how­ev­er, because only they know what the brand iden­ti­ty, strat­e­gy, val­ues, vision and objec­tives are. They may not have the abil­i­ty to trans­late all of that into mil­lions of per­son­alised expe­ri­ences across dozens of dig­i­tal chan­nels, nav­i­gat­ing laws around the world, but they must always be in the dri­ving seat.

“It is now on mar­keters to make or break the busi­ness because if they don’t cre­ate that expe­ri­ence, their brand could be in trou­ble,” says Mazour. “They are the pilot but their co-pilot is a machine that does 95% of the heavy lift­ing – a reli­able piece of AI that pro­vides full trans­paren­cy and vis­i­bil­i­ty as well as the abil­i­ty to jump in and take con­trol of any ele­ment. Mar­keters need that sit­ting next to them as their co-mar­keter, con­tin­u­al­ly rein­forc­ing those expe­ri­ences, cre­at­ing mem­o­ries and get­ting cus­tomers to come back.

“We believe by 2030 that’s how every sin­gle retail mar­keter will be run­ning, with Ome­tria as the co-mar­keter that pow­ers that. We do the whole thing, from under­stand­ing each cus­tomer, all the way to the cre­ation of expe­ri­ences across dozens of
dif­fer­ent chan­nels.”

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it ometria.com

Spon­sored by

Ome­tria