The physical retail and mail order landscape has been in a state of flux from the day the internet was opened up and helped to provide a so called level playing field for all.
The reality is that the pace of change, opportunities and dynamics associated with the internet were for many retailers largely ignored other than those that bolted on a me too website and stayed in protectionist mode around the store portfolio.
Then the likes of 'Amazon' started to eat away at their business, little by little the mighty marketplace nibbled away 'Uber' style by allowing anyone with a product similar to yours onto it's platform, and suddenly along with all those other niche eCommerce websites you woke up and 'BANG' what you thought was plenty of time to adjust had suddenly crept up on you.
At no time in retailing history has consumer inertia been so much in the consumers favour.
Today your website is probably one of the last places the consumer will go to look at products and services and find out who you really are.
Social commerce emphasizes individual taste and styling savvy over brands.
We are buying someone’s look, not a particular brand within it.
Marketing and promotional machinery is already moving toward wide product seeding across social shopping communities, monitoring the emerging bestsellers and amplifying the best performing product styling.
This monitor and optimise, product-centric model is the opposite of brand-centric communication. It is also the opposite of the current influencer marketing model.
IMO today those retail laggards are simply paying the market price that was gifted to those micro disruptive and innovative change makers they assumed would never catch them up.
For those that take the time to explore this new world you'll find that at last the level playing field has in fact arrived.
It comes in the form of 'Social Commerce, and it's already upending eCommerce websites along with those marketplaces that upended many a retailer.
Maybe, just maybe, this is a period of renaissance for retail?
If ecommerce took away the need to go to a physical store to browse, try on and buy clothes, social commerce removes the need to permanently own them. The total resale market is expected to double in value to $51 billion in the next five years, according to a report from ThredUp. Traditional retail operates on product newness and seasonality. In contrast, social commerce extends a product’s lifecycle nearly indefinitely, as the same product can be resold and prosperously revived in many different styles.
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