About Showrooming By Pedro Oliveira, Anthropologist & Consumer Researcher
If there is one name an ethnographically-based consultancy should know about is Genevieve Bell. Anthropologist, Intel Fellow, Director of User Experience at Intel, Genevieve Bell is one of the main reasons why ethnography (the study of consumers from a native’s point of view) is now one of the main approaches in technology studies, both in academia and in the commercial world. In the 2011 Paradiso Conference, Genevieve puts forward some very interesting statements on the relation between technology, money and consumer behaviour. It turns out that technology and traditional, physical tokens like cash don’t always walk hand in hand. Have a look.
Cash, as it turns out, is not going anywhere that soon. Once more, the argument that culture (´cash’ printed on paper, on this case) changes slower than technology (‘credit cards’ as its direct equivalent) is being push forward. How does this apply to the current controversies between online-only retail and brickand-mortar retailers? Nothing exemplifies this clash better than the Amazon Price Check application. To cut a long story short, in December 2011, Amazon launched a Price Check app allowing for the comparing of prices that offered consumers a $5 off a purchase. The app allows consumers to scan over an item’s bar code and compare the price to Amazon. Shoppers could use the discount up to three times. Even if the deal only lasted for 27 hours, retailers argue that Amazon has an unfair competitive advantage over brick and mortar because it doesn’t collect sales taxes on most goods sold (a controversy that carries on until today). The app is a clear example of ‘something’ that changes the relation between the user, the price and the physicality associated to cash. The app makes the ‘physical price’ found in situ become an anticipation of a ‘real price’ found online. The virtual slowly takes over the real, yet not replacing it fully, in the same way that credit cards are yet to fully replace ‘real cash’ (if they ever do). Shoppers’ current behaviour also makes you wonder if Catherine Keener’s satirical day job on Forty Year Old Virgin has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the film, Catherine Keener owns a small business where shoppers can check products available on E-bay. The joke revolves around the idea of customers coming into the shop, having a chance of real interaction with the products in display, yet not being able to buy them pronto. Unlike Genevieve Bell’s prediction, in Catherine Keener’s shop, cash is discouraged and fully replaced by the online buy. The joke lies precisely in a shop-innovation concept taken to its extreme, that is, something ahead of its time or moving faster than culture. Yet how much of a joke is this? Was Catherine Keener’s character mirroring the culture or just moving ahead of time? ‘Showrooming’, the trend of shoppers researching products on the high street before purchasing them online, casts a few doubts on whether Catherine Keener’s shop concept were ever a joke or a reflexion of modern times. Gregg Steinhafel, Target’s CEO, and Kathee Tesija, its EVP, recently issued a message to suppliers objecting to the use of brick and mortar as showrooms. In the UK, in 2011, Dixons, the electronics retail chain, launched a campaign encouraging consumers to visit brick and mortar stores before acquiring products online. Throughout there is this idea that the physical product and place, once two major components of the traditional marketing mix, are little more than an anticipation of its virtual equivalents. It is no longer the digital working as a means for selling the real (as in traditional ‘digital marketing’), but real products and places as ‘anticipations’ (tokens, in a semiotic language) of A
REAL sales channel that has happened to become digital. So, is the marketing mix going more and more digital? Or are we still relying, first and foremost, on the senses (touch, smell, vision) to make our digital decisions? The question is complex but implications to marketing and innovation are many. Better to keep a real eye on both digital and real sales channels, all the more as they merge together to capture one’s senses in new and unexpected ways. 08/02/2012