Sales and marketing engage more channels than ever before. Today, manufacturers, brands, retailers, and service providers juggle omnichannel B2B, B2C, and D2C social commerce processes.
In struggling every hour of every day to manage complex paths between products, services, and consumers, most are unaware that they are failing to understand how a myriad of factors, feeds, and influencers are affecting their buyers’ brand experience and behavior.
Businesses, ranging from today’s digital-native hyperscale retailers and marketplaces, to global and local brands, retailers, and service providers who have spent decades building consumer value in an offline world, now watch helplessly as their relationships with target audiences fracture in so many ways.
Why are they losing out?
It is unclear to most of those losing out as they try to piece together business priorities from fast-multiplying digital information feeds why this is happening.
But this demands increasingly urgent management attention as errors can end precious brand, product, or vendor reputations. One mistake in the smallest detail matters. An unflattering product image, the incorrect price point, or a misleading descriptor risks losing not just individual sales, but hard-earned consumer loyalty.
Unsurprisingly, most manufacturers, brands, retailers, and service providers cannot devote the resources they need to manage today's failing commerce systems composed, as they are, from a myriad of specialist suppliers and technologies.
The rise of commerce anarchy
The result is an exponential rise in complexity as management teams try to tame commerce anarchy.
Like it or not, manufacturers, brands, retailers, and service providers have no option but to be engaged in a high-stakes game in which they can lose out very quickly, not just now, or in the short term, but forever.
Successfully navigating the space which connects businesses to their customers is an increasingly complex task. To date, many have adopted a piecemeal approach, particularly to product feed management and data feed management. Optimizing a feed here, a product description there, month after month after month…
Optimizing isn’t the answer
Only optimizing does not help, it just adds to the chaos. Because solving tactical issues today creates tomorrow’s fragmented buyer journeys and chaotic brand experiences.
Optimizing for a single channel, or across a single market sector, country, or product in order to get on the digital shelf is, in fact, extremely dangerous in a globally connected digital world. It risks a gradual loss of customer control and brand power over time and on many levels.
Regional teams or junior decision-makers can attempt to calm the commerce chaos, playing catch-up with ad hoc sales and marketing solutions. But this approach, based on fragmented, tactical measures taken in haste, risks missing out on long-tail sales, downgrading customer relationships, and, ultimately, squandering the chance to develop and maintain global best practices.
The result? Being, simply, out-competed.
Transforming relationships
Without a new approach, businesses right across the spectrum, from digital-native hyperscale retailers and marketplaces to global and local retailers, brands, and service providers are all vulnerable.
The strategic commerce management challenge is therefore not to optimize digital processes, but to transform relationships. Only an entirely fresh approach will bring manufacturers, brands, retailers, and service providers the personalized consumer-centric approach they need going forward.
Businesses only thrive when they exert effective control over every aspect of their global information value chains. Only then, can they manage the powerful outbound digital flows and deep feedback loops linking them digitally to buyers and the performance insights that result.
Turning commerce chaos into commercial success
Harnessing this feedback delivers actionable insights and turns commerce chaos into commercial success. Using intelligent automation driven by artificial intelligence and third-party services integration converts the complexity currently obscuring their decision-making into a sustained competitive advantage.
Tomorrow’s winners will not be the optimizers of today, who win only locally and temporarily, just to lose out globally. The only strategy for success will be to implement information value chain management strategies across all their omnichannel B2B, B2C, and D2C social commerce channels and products, simultaneously.
Doing this on a single platform globally allows them to adapt quickly to changes and capture new opportunities.
How can this be achieved? Read my next blog post to find out.