Three Prime Candidates for Digital Commerce Innovation

As we head into the holiday shopping season, it’s easy to get caught up in the predictions that this year’s online spending will be bigger than ever: Deloitte says holiday sales will be up 3.5-4%, Adobe Digital predicts that Cyber Monday will hit a new milestone of $3B in online sales, while the NRF’s survey suggest that 46.1% of all holiday shopping will be done online. The overwhelming number of things that need to be done to prepare for Cyber Monday may have some digital commerce leaders running at full speed. But the time is now to plan for 2016 innovation – budgets are getting secured and plans are being made – so raise your head up from operations for just a moment to get ahead of the curve.

Our 2015-2016 CMO Survey showed significant increases in spend for digital commerce and heightened expectations that marketing play a leadership role in strategic planning, innovation and digital commerce (subscribers can read more detail on the findings in Digital Commerce Is Prime Candidate for Innovation in 2016).

Where should digital commerce marketers look for the next innovative idea?

If you don’t have the luxury of an innovation lab like the teams at Walmart, Macy’s and CVS, you can still engage your teams in ideation and testing. Here are three areas that keep coming up in conversation and have great potential for positive business results:

Mobile Shopping on Pinterest

• Shoppable media: The evolution of the hotly debated ‘Buy Now’ button in social media and innovations in branded content all point to a very active innovation scene when it comes to combining content with commerce (clients see “Use Content to Attract, Engage and Convert in Digital Commerce” ). Imagine what great media your brand has that can move beyond attracting and engaging your audiences – but might actually lead to convenient and fun shopping experiences.
• Personalization: Most brands don’t have enough data about shoppers’ buying habits to get as granular as Netflix or Amazon with their highly tailored recommendations. What they can do is combine their own data with the rich array of available 3rd party data to get closer to solid recommendations and attempt to surprise and delight consumers. Just because you don’t have the data, doesn’t mean that you should assume it cannot be done. Consider what clever types of personalization might be possible – if only you did an experiment with more data than your own.
• Internet of Things: From pushing a button to order detergent via Amazon Dash to a refrigerator that buys more milk, there are a lot of known use cases for frequent re-ordering of product being explored by IoT advocates. While convenient, I know that there are thousands of other pain points that consumers wish could be resolved – getting closer to your customer and understanding their wishes might unlock entirely unexpected use cases that IoT capabilities can empower – providing you a competitive advantage. The holiday season is so busy – which makes it SO data rich – set aside time after the new year to interrogate your data streams from holiday 2015 and use that to spur ethnographic research into your customer base. Who knows what gems you’ll find!

If these three ideas aren’t up your alley – don’t stop believing in innovation. Instead, think about how you can foster a culture of innovation to take advantage of this amazing time in digital commerce.

SOURCE: Gartner