Article • 29 11 2022

What if omnichannelity is hurting your brand?

We hesitated for a long time with a more straightforward title: "Omnichannelity kills the brand", then we put some nuance back in this polarized world.

That’s it, the border between pure-players and traditional retail players is blurring. On the one hand, pure-players are deploying their physical concept to build their brand, and on the other hand, traditional players have sharpened their digital tools.
In both cases, CRM and supply chain management solutions have been progressively integrated so that customer paths and distribution channels are increasingly linked.
What’s more, the customer is increasingly recognized from pre-sales to post-sales. That’s great!

The problem with all this is that we have put so much energy into customer and business performance that we have forgotten the most fragile and at the same time the most durable asset of your company: the brand.

Indeed, receiving tons of sponsored posts on your Instagram feed after doing a search on Google or simply discussing this topic with friends is not really rewarding for the person that is your brand.

Worse, your brand, like an overly clingy friend, will send you a little text message to remind you that Black Friday (which extends so far beyond Friday that you can’t tell which one it is) is ending in 24 hours and that your overheated email box will now have 10,000 unread emails.

Let’s imagine that you really needed that product that was pushed to you. You’re going to go to the store, buy the product, fill in your details and you’re going to get an email to evaluate the experience to make you work a little harder.

Simply put, the adage “run from me I’ll follow you, follow me I’ll run from you” also applies to branding.
In a world where we receive hundreds of stimuli a day, the brands that will stand out will be those that reinject rarity, exclusivity and relevance.

Rarity because what is rare has value. And in an inflationary context, the value of the brand as a lever to increase prices will be decisive.

Exclusive, because consumers know what’s going on behind the scenes of marketing and are tired of receiving all those “pokes” and dream of ROMO*.

Fair because it is no longer enough to bludgeon a message to win the war for attention. You have to be there at the right time and find the right words. It’s eminently more complex and therefore more affinity-based.

The brand must be managed like a living being. The relational posture it maintains with its “customer” friends must be in line with this.

Let’s rework the paths to be more frugal in terms of messages (and lower the carbon impact of communication). Let’s remove the mental load we put on our customers by reducing forms and reducing data collection to focus on the essentials (most of us don’t use half the data we have at our disposal anyway)

All this might make you think that it will damage your business. It is the responsibility of brands to do better with less. In the long run, it’s not only your results of the last few years that valued your company but your brand equity (look at the multipliers of Supreme, Off White, Byredo, Tom Ford…)

It’s time to put everything back together, make better use of our toys and work on omnichannelity through the lens of the brand.

*relief of missing out

Dragon Rouge has launched a UX/CX squad within its Strategic Hub, which, thanks to workshops mixing design thinking and ideation, delivers solutions to improve the brand experience.

Mathieu Sakkas, Dragon Rouge France CEO