The omnichannel experience requires shopper-centric architecture.

A Hub white paper by Heidi Froseth of Catapult.

Omnichannel is no longer theoretical or just a buzz-worthy industry topic; it is our new marketing ecoculture. However, there have been varying points-of-view on what omnichannel is and questions about whether it’s achievable. As always with innovation and trends, there’s confusion. So, let’s define omnichannel, establish principles, and enact a framework.

To start, it is critical to distinguish between omnichannel retailing and omnichannel shopping. Currently, retailers are functioning as multichannel operators, but they aspire to provide omnichannel experiences to shoppers via data integration, technology and logistics. This drive toward omnichannel is powered by a fundamental shift in shopper behavior. Shoppers are increasingly multichannel, living fluidly and engaging across multiple channels with an increasing expectation (and demand) for a personalized experience, with convenience and value in their journey.

Because retailers are dealing with these foundational shifts, a new and evolving discipline is required. Omnichannel is still in its infancy, balancing abstraction and vision, but that’s all the more reason to define and refine this new frontier.

There’s a need to understand the why and the inertia behind the business rationale of structuring and committing to omnichannel philosophies across all marketing, but especially shopper marketing. Shoppers live omnichannel. It’s how they experience their shopping: offline, home, brick-and-mortar, and digitally. Therefore, retailers and marketers must step up and meet them where, when, and how they want to be reached, while aligning with their values. Retailers are indeed multichannel, but being omnichannel means being present in all channels their shoppers use. So let’s establish two definitions:

Omnichannel retailing. An operational strategy to deliver a continuous, integrated, and personalized customer-centric retail experience to shopper marketing across all transactional channels.

Omnichannel shopping. A shopper’s search for relevant retail experiences that meet their needs, encourage their desires, match their values, inspire their indulgences, and create rewarding experiences that reflect their ideals.

Part of being omnichannel is centralizing content and strategies via multiple layers — mobile, dot-com, in-store, etc. — with each supporting the master strategy. Consumers can engage by whatever method they please, and easily toggle between devices and experiences without disruption. In this way, retailers provide the best possible service and customer experience to drive brand affinity, conversion, and, ultimately, loyalty.

Today’s omnichannel consumers are exceptionally sophisticated and evolved. They are the dog wagging the tail and they know it. Traditional marketing, especially advertising, relies on a basic premise: The marketer presents stimuli and the consumer acts. Today’s landscape is significantly more complex. Consumers know what they want, and have many ways of obtaining it. They require retailers to address their needs and inspire their wants with experiences that are notable and deliver relevant value — whether it’s an experience that is unique, exquisite, convenient or affordable. Further, they expect this to just happen. Consumers who shop omnichannel are 30 percent more valuable and loyal. There is no better rationale than that to learn how to win in omnichannel.

The marketer’s role is to provide innovation, thought leadership and expertise to their brands (and to retailers) to satisfy the demands of this growing and demanding omnichannel shopper. And, yes, everyone involved should carry a comfortable fear of omnichannel. Gone are the days of shelf- or retailer-back approaches. Today’s omnichannel experience demands a shopper-back approach.

The Omnichannel Framework

Most exciting about omnichannel is that it knocks down antiquated, unavailing marketing silos. Omnichannel marketing, like shopper marketing, should be a fully integrated way of working, and not an isolated function or department; it is a true collaboration. A best-in-class collaboration follows this principled framework:

Start with and institute a strategic business planning and modeling practice. This begins with broad-stroke insights, combined with the right segmentation and an understanding of shopper need-states as well as their values. Learn how their behavior is changing and then inspire them.

Building technology and content strategies, fulfilling business objectives and shopper needs. This may require investments and high-level alignment across numerous portions of your organization to ensure commitment and investment for success.

Everyone activates. When omnichannel becomes the way everyone thinks, when knowing when a shopper wants information, how they want it, and what they want becomes everyone’s focus, it touches every marketing function and beyond. It’s up to everyone to deliver on this growing opportunity.

Get the best, most relevant and actionable data. You’re only as good as your data, so don’t settle for good enough. If you want transactional data, partner with those who have the best. Omnichannel is a data-driven framework. Building out systems of data helps arm teams with how shoppers shop across all channels and empowers the team to be better listeners.

Develop a turnkey deployment and activation strategy that can be scaled, and know when and how to activate it. There are times to build out audience and expand reach, and then there are times to focus on conversion and incremental sales.

Get small, get personal. The ultimate goal is to deliver the most customized and personal experience possible. Make sure you are enrolling and integrating marketing, and creative automation systems that allow flexibility in messaging strategies and that can be deployed and activated as desired.

All of this is feasible today because we have the necessary data and technology. It’s a top-down mentality — and those who do this correctly are positioning themselves to be the most inventive marketing architects across the board. As architects, we understand social and mobile, can break down data and disseminate it accordingly across various trigger points, and can scout out the next ‘big thing’ to reach shoppers.

Organizations also need to consider re-engineering on many levels around omnichannel. It’s not dissimilar from when SAP came into existence with software that transformed finance, supply chain, demand planning, and forecasting. Companies had to reconfigure their mainframe and support systems. In this case, it’s a question of whom you put in which chair, with what kind of thinking, in the building or off-site, and who can lead to the ultimate goal of one-to-one marketing.

As for working with consumer-goods partners, omnichannel can be looked at as the next step of a greater evolution. At one time, retailers relied on brands to bring in sweeping demographics (e.g., females aged 25-54), which four-plus years ago quickly became immaterial when consumer segments could be refined through geo-targeting, transaction history and ZIP codes. At the time, brands were talking about cross-channel marketing or transactions that touch a digital medium but weren’t completed on the Internet. Today, brands are talking with retailers about multichannel and omnichannel.

Retailers need their brand management and business partners to offer insights into the best ways to reach their shared shopper and be omnipresent. Sales and category professionals do care where and how things are sold. Brand managers can get some power back and increase their one-to-one engagement with shoppers.

Johnson & Johnson Shows The Way

To explore this relationship between brands and retailers in an omnichannel world, consider Johnson & Johnson. ‘Mom and baby’ represents one of the most fertile grounds in omnichannel. Millennial parents of an 18-month-old are still adjusting to life with little or no sleep. They’re different people now and that includes how they shop, consume and spend their time. Maybe now they are Amazon Prime members for diapers, formula, shampoo and wipes. Perhaps they also like to visit a store just to get out of the house.

Brands can help retailers discover where new parents are and be there for the growth of their child. Johnson & Johnson, through the power of its mega-site, babycenter.com, collaborates and partners with other brands, like Gerber and Kimberly-Clark, to increase relevance. Through understanding how consumers interact with the site, the brand can stay relevant along every milestone and new-parent question. J&J knows when a baby needs extra skincare from Aveeno; is a toddler and moving into a pull-up diaper; is teething; has his or her first birthday; and when Pre-K school starts. The brand can have an incredibly authentic conversation with young parents and follow along with the growth of their child. Babycenter.com is not an ordinary website; it is a trusted and credible parenting source. Along the way, it has added mobile apps, posted on Instagram, and much more.

Johnson & Johnson partnered with Target by leading shared omnichannel executions of one of its most successful summer events: Build Your Own First-Aid Kit. Knowing that summer is a time when parents need to be prepared for the many events of outdoor adventures, complete with scrapes, cuts and bruises, J&J was right there to help parents prepare. Print ads in magazines like Family Circle and in Target mailers further inspired parents.

The event included emails from babycenter.com and a promotional page for the program on Target.com. YouTube pre-roll videos, banner ads throughout various locations, and a content microsite were all deployed to engage parents as they planned for the summer. In-store, an endcap with a free, designer First-Aid kit with purchase, closed the sale. It’s a program that helps parents wherever they are, and more important solved a problem before it became a problem.

In another example, Walmart leveraged its ‘Share a Little Funshine’ campaign with the M&M’S brand and partners as a way to have fun with summer. The program utilized Conversant for a targeted digital campaign as well as online coupons and a dedicated microsite, myconfectioncorner.com, touting a $100 Walmart e-gift card drawing. A blogger effort on the microsite pushed M&M’S recipes, summer drinks to enjoy with kids, and entertaining pet activities during summer get-togethers.

The program leaned on social media to let consumers share memories, kicked off with a Twitter party. Inside stores, a colorful pallet owned the action alley. Signage directed shoppers to share moments and get summer tips using the mobile app Blippar, with instructions on how to download and use the app. The campaign seamlessly helped shoppers spruce up their summer.

The omnichannel framework requires new tools that all retailers need to understand and know how to execute for their shoppers. These include tools such as mobile, shop-able content, cross-channel customer-relationship management platforms, real-time logistics management, loyalty programs, data modeling and advanced analytics, advanced shopper segmentation and personalization engines. From the top down, marketers need to know how to leverage data to know who is shopping and why they buy. They must align and reflect shoppers’ values through messaging and execution, focus on creating relevant experiences, and continuously test meaningful, data-driven improvements.

Every retailer needs to build an omnichannel framework and treat the shopping experience as a fluid one. Some are leading in this space. Nordstrom, for example, is doing a great job of investing, testing and leveraging its segmentation and analytics. The depth of personalization that activates Nordstrom’s approach is felt from the online experience to how associates engage with clients, to how the retailer creates individualized catalogs for each shopper based on purchase history.

Nordstrom creates loyalty by knowing its shoppers inside and out. For a recent annual Nordstrom anniversary sale, it blew in a special, mini-catalogue with offers based on individual shopping behavior. Nordstrom associates also place personal phone calls to shoppers, again based on shopper behavior, engagement and loyalty.

Omnichannel is no longer just a buzzword because it can’t afford to be. The shopper-back philosophy will close the gap between how shoppers behave and how retailers react. It will likely require a total re-engineering of how a company does business, and if it does, that conversation started yesterday. Forward-thinking marketers need to understand quickly what this means for their brands, organization and retail partners, and lead the way to opportunity with tomorrow’s marketing architecture.