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You need a brilliant idea to buy into

An organisation should aim for three outcomes. You must build customer loyalty. You must make your customers advocate your brand and act as brand ambassadors. And, if you make a mistake, their long-term loyalty should make them forgive you.– Abdulla Mahmood

Product, price and space matter. However, what matters even more today is the customer experience.

Retail’s new-age customers are not just those who walk into a store but also those who sit at home – or even at work – browsing and purchasing online, the kings/queens of all they survey.

Spoilt for choice, they care little about loyalty, more about experiences and stories. It’s a buyer’s market retailers have to contend with, unlike many years ago when sellers dominated. Back then, retailers didn’t care much about marketing their products. Today, they can’t ignore marketing initiatives.

The Marketing Conclave examined ways and means of devising a game-changing experience for the savvy, well-informed, always connected consumers of today to gain their loyalty.

Personalisation is a great way to win hearts“Every time we have a new experience, it resets our expectations,” says international marketing specialist Simon Hathaway, president & global head of RX (retail experience), Cheil Worldwide. “Each day our expectations are being transformed by technology. Today, I have my personal

You need to take customer opinion seriously to keep them coming back. And to keep them visiting, engage with them through different channels and inform them about the latest product launches. – Abhish Chandok

shopping mall on my smartphone to access my favourite brands anytime, anywhere.”

“We are in the business of customers,” adds Lennard Otto, general manager of IMG Worlds of Adventure, among the largest of Dubai’s upcoming indoor themed-entertainment destinations. “They are the focal point. We call them guests who pay to buy an experience from us. We concentrate on three components to offer them a memorable experience – personalisation, engagement and entertainment.”

“Personalisation is a great way to win the hearts of today’s customers because they aspire to stand out in a crowd. We have to harness and use data judiciously and entertain them to engage them constructively if we are to increase their dwell time and spend. Apple stores are good examples of how to do this. People spend a lot of time in them, engaging with the products. We will do the same at IMG Worlds of Adventure. We will

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what percentage of their customer base is from which region,” points out Srikanth Parthasarathy, senior vice president of Dubai-based furniture and furnishing concept Homes R Us.

“Customer profiling is a bigger challenge in the UAE, especially Dubai, because of the eclectic demographic profile and distribution. If retailers succeed in profiling their customers, they would solve some of their bigger challenges. Probably that’s why Dubai often serves as the testing ground for retailers to first test their concepts before going beyond,” he adds.

There are various ways to deliver on a promiseIf you know your customers you know what to deliver. “That’s critical for retailers – to deliver the exact expectation they set for customers as part of their marketing pitch,” Hathaway observes.

But that’s a fine line to decipher, feels Abhish Chandok, general manager – marketing Russia, Middle East and Africa,

Himalaya Drug Company. “As brand owners and marketers, we tend to end up confusing our consumers. Consider the number and range of face washes available in the market – for normal, oily, dry and combination skin types. The list is endless, confusing the consumer. In the name of segmentation and personalisation we fragment the market. So the onus is on us to simplify the paths to purchase – and there are various ways of doing that,” he comments.

Yes, there are diverse ways, complements Abdulla Mahmood, director – marketing and corporate communication of UAE-based Al Ahli Holding Group. “Educate, engage, entertain, empower and excite – these were our guidelines when we developed Comicave, the world’s largest pop culture store in Dubai.”

“How did we do this? We divided our store into zones – sci-fi to attract science fiction buffs, Marvel and DC for graphic comic book enthusiasts. We created an immersive environment, hiring comic book enthusiasts to engage with our customers. We also created a concept

A Harvard study showed that around 89% of people believe the customer experience and loyalty are enriched if store staff converse with them in their home language. So speaking in your customer’s language is important, especially in Dubai, which has a multicultural expatriate community and sees a huge tourist influx.– Lennard Otto

Retailers must use their brands to build an emotional connect with consumers, who make a place for brands they like. So it’s very important to keep in touch with consumers. – Kritika Rawat

entertain our guests with amusement, entertainment, F&B and retail,” he elaborates.

A fulfilling guest experience isn’t limited to gigantic indoor theme parks. It applies to mass market retailing too, like hypermarkets.

“People come to shop at our Lulu Hypermarkets with a certain expectation. So what can we do to ensure a great customer experience?” asks Nandakumar Vijayan, chief communications officer of Abu Dhabi-based retail conglomerate Lulu Group International.

“We changed our tagline to ‘Where the world comes to shop’ to change perception of Lulu Hypermarket catering only to the Asian community. People don’t expect to be entertained when they shop for groceries. But we began entertaining our global audience by celebrating their festivals, focusing on particular product categories they connect with. We saw the positive impact as growing traffic converted into growing sales,” he shares.

But that requires a better understanding of customers and where they’re coming from. “Customer profiling in the Gulf region isn’t easy, given its multicultural nature. Retailers can’t exactly pinpoint

Loyalty today is aligned to engagement and experience. In addition to deploying innovative technology solutions, retailers need to hire the right people who understand the significance of creating the right customer experience. – Mustafa Sadek

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experience could be through delivering goods to your doorstep for free or reimbursing your parking charges. That’s where omnichannel can be effectively used,” he comments.

Mustafa Sadek, founder & CEO of Dubai-based customer engagement and loyalty platform UrbanBuz, holds a similar view. “For some reason, loyalty has been made synonymous with a card. That’s changing slowly. It’s being aligned to engagement and experience. Take the examples of Apple and Nike that built loyalty without having a loyalty programme. These brands created the required experience, building a strong relationship with their customers. Of course, part of the experience is rewards and incentives,” he expands.

You need the right people with the right mindset“To understand loyalty you need to look at the whole customer journey, which no longer revolves around the store. That journey starts before they walk into the store and continues after they leave. It’s important to understand this. While technology is an enabler, people matter more. You can use the best and most advanced technologies to understand the customer journey but if you don’t have

relevant and personalised manner,” he expounds.

Loyalty grows with engagement and experienceDoes personalisation promote loyalty? Nandakumar thinks a loyal customer is a myth today. A retailer may issue a card and offer points on every purchase to keep customers loyal. But if they forget to bring their card when shopping, they don’t earn points. So where does loyalty stand then?

“Our research shows that consumers don’t necessarily return to retailers because of their loyalty card. They go back for a new product launch or sale. Or they are loyal to the brand for some other reason. So the card and the points don’t really make a customer loyal. It’s something else. It’s the experience that brings them back to the store. That

The onus of building a context is on advertisers. They should differentiate the brand message on different channels – outdoor, television, radio, print, social media. While the process has become more sophisticated today, it’s also easier. Brands can identify their target audience with tools like Audience Insights freely available to every Facebook user. They can reach them with relevant and personalised messages that are specifically tailored to communicate effectively in the chosen channel.– Narain Jashanmal

A consumer is loyal till the time she is in your store. Once she leaves, loyalty can’t be guaranteed. So retailers must create new ways and means to keep customers entertained and bring them back. – Nandakumar Vijayan

called the Volt, a special door that opens only on certain occasions to entertain visitors with fun competitions and games,” he explains.

Building an emotional connect with consumersWhat’s really interesting is the emergence of new technology and platforms, especially social media, that enable retailers to build a connect with the community and drive sales, Hathaway points out.

Narain Jashanmal, head of direct response advertising, MENA, Facebook/Instagram, sees commerce as one of Facebook’s central activities today – be it pages maintained by commerce-based organisations or community-based groups dealing in second hand goods. “A key reason why this is so important for us is because if you think of web 1.0 and the way people found products on their desktops, it was really about search. But search captures only active, not passive, intent. Personalisation works much better on social media sites. It’s about tapping into the right demand, complemented by the right products and services in a highly

Businesses are beginning to design their agenda out of love as they realise the importance of tapping into this social context.– Natasha Rockstrom

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the right people, your endeavour could be futile. Retailers should hire the right people who understand the significance of creating the right customer experience,” Sadek explains.

“Retailers must change and empower their people. That’s the only way they can hope to understand customer needs, meet those needs and even go beyond,” adds Hathaway.

Gifting is a way of growing “We have to first get both perspectives right – of retailers and consumers – if we are to align the proposition of driving additional footfall to stores with customer expectations. We address this through the gifting proposition. How can a brand – whether entertainment, grocery or fashion – get into gifting? It must give a reason for productising the gifting concept,” says TP Pratap, chief marketing officer of India-based gift card technology and retail firm QwikCilver Solutions.

The company claims the proposition works wonders because gifting strikes the right balance between emotionally connecting with consumers, keeping in mind their likes and dislikes, and popularising brands to drive commerce for the retailers.

“A big part of my job is selling brands

by advertising on radio,” shares Kritika Rawat, managing director of Kkompany. “We have a lot of marketing people coming to us and we design campaigns for them. I think marketing professionals in this part of the world are very traditional, conventional and archaic.”

“They come with the urge to be different but don’t really want to do things differently. They want to do the same thing, yet be different. They want their brand name and tag line five times in a sentence. What they don’t understand is that consumers have to experience the brand and tag line rather than simply hearing the name. They don’t have to memorise the tag line. However, it’s difficult to convince marketing heads of companies to change their outlook. They have to look beyond their brand to emotionally connect and engage with consumers,” she suggests.

Tapping into the social context to connectHowever, Hathaway feels brands are now beginning to realise the value of doing things for the right reasons.

It’s a view Natasha Rockstrom, co-founder of Injoy Giving, a gifting website in the UAE that makes it easier for residents to engage in charity, shares. “What we do for love outweighs what we do for greed. Businesses are beginning to design their agenda out of love as they realise the importance of tapping into this social context. We did an exercise recently where we ran a priceless menu at a restaurant one evening, with people coming in and paying whatever they thought was worth for the food and services. That evening, the restaurant made 125% more than what their actual retail prices would have got them. That’s how we evoked deeper human ties. That’s how we build brand loyalty,” she relates.

“Every business needs to have a purpose,” observes Nisha Varman Shetty, founder of The Urban Yogi, a home-grown sustainable furniture and furnishing retailer. “The journey is never easy. When we started The Urban Yogi in 2012, shopping malls weren’t receptive to smaller brands in their premises. We had to improvise, putting up pop-up outlets from time-to-time because the brand had to grow. But we were lucky to have Facebook to help us in building the brand, one like at a time, and growing our customer base,” she recounts.

“Today, consumers are smart. They are

We use words like customers, consumers and shoppers. What we forget is they are all people. They are human beings. So marketers must understand that a personal connection needs to be established to make brands click among real people. – Simon Hathaway

Loyalty is an abstract thing but it can definitely be measured. What matters is how retailers connect with their guests, eventually making them loyal brand ambassadors. – Nisha Varman Shetty

Retailers can solve some of their bigger challenges if they do their customer profiling successfully. – Srikanth Parthasarathy

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only when a customer intends to make a purchase or actually buys. It’s important to remember a simple rule about human nature: People may forget what you say or do, but they never forget how you treated them. If you treat your customers well, there’s a higher possibility they’ll be loyal to you. But they will also expect the same or better services the next time they shop with you,” Leander continues.

“Why do we go to Starbucks and pay a premium to buy a cup of coffee after standing in the queue? It’s because of the experience. You’ve got to listen to what your customers are saying across channels – in-store, online and on social media – if you want to offer them the kind of experience they’re looking for. But even listening doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t respond. That’s something retailers must understand and take seriously. The tone of voice must be correct while interacting with customers across multiple channels,” he advises.

“What’s also important is customer service at the point of sale. Most retailers aren’t doing this well despite the right technology being available. They have to step up the game if they want to please the customers of today and tomorrow. They can do this by customising the experience from start to end of the customer journey – pre, during and post purchase. However, there can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution,” Leander cautions.

“What matters is the value addition you

One barometer to test brand loyalty is to see whether consumers are willing to prepay to avail a service or product later. Today, the best of brands don’t have that. The experience is more significant than the product itself. – TP Pratap

keen to know how the products are made, how the wood is sourced, whether trees were felled, whether working conditions for artisans are humane and so on. They are becoming more and more conscious about these elements. That’s why we do a lot of storytelling. Loyalty is an abstract thing but it can definitely be measured. What matters is how retailers connect with their guests, eventually making them loyal brand ambassadors,” Shetty avers.

“Of course, there must be a product to buy to begin with, but, importantly, there must also be a brilliant idea for them to buy into,” summarises Hathaway. “If retailers get that right, the associated elements fall in place.”

Listen, don’t be indifferent to customers“What’s the biggest reason why customers leave you,” asks Michael Leander, CEO of The Michael Leander Company. “Is it because they are influenced by friends? Is it because they are attracted by competition? Or is it because your indifference turns them away?”

“Almost 68% are driven away by indifference,” he says.

“Think about it! Brands tend to be attentive

offer to your customers, who walk into a store expecting something. If they get something more, something beyond their expectation, that will build brand loyalty and drive them to share their experience with the world,” he opines.

Don’t’ confuse your customer, be relevant“You must understand the culture of the region you operate in,” says Shawn Sipman, executive: customer engagement and commerce, UCS Solutions. “Essentially, good marketing is ‘Sotho’, which, in a South African dialect, means ‘people first’. You must speak your customer’s language. For example, in Dubai, which has a multicultural expatriate population and sees a large tourist influx, retailers must hire store staff that speak different languages.”

“Retailers must consult with their customers to set service standards, increase access to services, ensure higher levels of courtesy, provide more and better information about services, increase openness and transparency about services, remedy failures and mistakes and give the best possible value for money. All this resonates well with customers,” he elaborates.

“Marketing initiatives need to be contextual, relevant and well targeted. It’s a mistake to bombard customers with messages across channels that don’t mean anything to them. The customer journey has changed, with 57% of a sale happening even before customers touch your brand. They probably heard about the brand from a friend, a blog or social media. So the journey could start at any point, not necessarily at the store,” Sipman continues.

What’s important is to bring the context into the marketing initiative. “What retailers really need to do is deliver the right message to the right person at the right time,” Sipman suggests.

And while personalisation ensures a greater customer experience, it goes beyond merely remembering a customer’s name while sending her an e-mail or remembering her device settings. What matters is building a total picture of the customer, regardless of the device or channel of interaction. It pays for the retailer to keep the following things in mind:■ Capture real-time customer data to assess

intent ■ Deliver consistent content across all

devices, screens and channels■ Connect personalisation tools to back-end

solutions■ Leverage the Internet of Things to harness

the collected data “Retail must be everywhere, instant and personal. The perception of value has changed. It is no longer price times quality. It is price times quality divided by convenience,” he concludes. ■

Michael Leander

Shawn Sipman