To understand the value of retailification, you must unequivocally agree that consumers are the ones transforming banking — not bankers.
You must also understand that a few factors are intersecting to irreversibly change the way we do business:
- The physical and the digital worlds of currency are converging.
- Consumers are becoming increasingly tech-native.
- Consumer needs and expectations are radically shifting.
- Technological innovation is advancing more rapidly than ever before.
These same intersecting factors are disrupting the retail industry as well. To combat these shifts, top retailers have realized consumers value experiences more than they valueproducts. Rather than leading with product, then, they’re leading with the experience.
Financial institutions can take a lesson from this shift in the retail approach. Banks need to develop experiences that focus on meeting consumers’ day-to-day needs and future aspirations, as opposed to opening checking accounts and counting cash. Forrester Research Principal Analyst, Alyson Clarke, recently presented findings on emerging consumer preferences, including tips on how to succeed in the current “Age of the Customer.”
To create those valuable, memorable consumer experiences, enter retailification, a retail-driven approach financial institutions can use to create experience-driven banking.
Retailification leverages proven strategies from the retail industry to create a more effective way for financial institutions around the world to orchestrate more engaging and personalized experiences across all banking touchpoints.
Creating an experience worth sharing, remembering and reliving.
Twenty years ago, few people would’ve predicted that an embattled computer company would transform the shopping experience for technological goods. Yet with the advent of the first Apple Store and Genius Bar in 2001, the retail industry experienced a small but noticeable seismic shift. Apple’s retail ops VP, Ron Johnson, “turned the boring computer sales floor into a sleek playroom filled with gadgets,” wrote the New York Times.
Apple stores opened at a time when malls and the stores inside them were beginning to decline in popularity – yet that’s just where Apple put many of its outposts. Today, an Apple Store inside a mall can actually increase sales by 10% — for the entire mall.
Apple bucked the naysayers and took a contrarian approach to retail sales that has worked spectacularly for 15 years.
If anything, those stores have been the example of how brands can employ retailification to upset industry biases. And today, we see strong consumer attachments to virtual retailers like Zappos and Amazon as well.
Both companies fueled their brands through an unwavering focus on creating attractive, responsive consumer experiences. When you visit an Apple Store, you’re a name, not a buyer. When you buy from Amazon, you’re a person, not an order number.
By putting personalized experiences front and center, they made shopping feel special again.
Source: Raja Bose
