The Evolution of the Shopping Experience

With the onset of digital technology, the shopping experience is radically changing. Manufacturers, retailers and consumers are converging in digital space, creating the ability for brands to apply what they’ve learned from real-time data to alter their delivery of goods. In today’s always-on environment of mobile apps and social media, consumers are influenced by their digital world and are challenging brand manufacturers and retailers to “up their game.” Brand manufacturers that embrace this challenge and focus on personalizing the customer experience will ultimately build a more loyal customer base. The experience in retail has transformed into a two-way street between the brand manufacturer and consumer, a trend that will continue to grow and evolve.
 
As brands collect data and analyze the insights from consumers’ buying behaviors, increased attention is being put towards bringing better products to market and ultimately creating a more rewarding customer experience. Brand manufacturers are striving to keep pace with consumers and better anticipate their needs. To do this, technology needs to play a central role in how brand marketers are using collaboration, simulation and visualization to enhance the retail experience.

Accelerating Product Time to Market with Collaboration

In a crowded retail marketplace, over 80 percent of new product introductions fail within their first year. When you take into consideration the time and resources that typically go into bringing a product to market, seeing a product fail is a huge financial and R&D set-back, if not catastrophic to the business entirely.  This is why it’s absolutely essential that brands set a proper course at the onset of product development.  As brands work to improve their chances of developing products that resonate with consumers, they are turning to digital collaboration and visualization tools from the start of the design process.  Using 3D product simulation affords the opportunity to create, virtually, what will happen in reality. Brands will experience many efficiencies along the way, which will improve time to market and bottomline margins.
 
Collaboration among marketers and package designers can minimize time to market, a key step to gaining a competitive edge and meeting consumer demands. By enabling package development teams to collaborate seamlessly on a 3D design, the process is accelerated.  When you introduce marketing into the mix, the sharing of research and consumer insights at the time of product development ensures the product accurately reflects the desires and needs of the consumer.

Consumer Feedback: Key to Product Differentiation

Today’s social-savvy buyers share their product experiences online and smart marketers are leveraging this data to ensure their product is selected among a sea of options. Differentiating features such as packaging color and the feel of a product can set a product apart. All of these elements can first be tested through simulation software to better inform marketing decisions that can impact initial response to a product. Packages designed using a collaborative software platform that enables visualization of the developed product are in a better position to be modified on the fly to better optimize sales.
 
Once the package is designed, marketers can use simulation technology to collaborate with retailers and simulate how a product will be best brought to market. For example, a shampoo manufacturer introducing a new product line can work with retailers to develop a plan that best displays that product in the store. By 3D-modeling its shelf placement and how the product appears among direct competitors, brands and retailers together can simulate how consumers will respond and can adjust plans to optimize response.

Creating a Better Customer Experience

Retailers are also focused on listening to their customers to create a better shopping experience. As the worlds of online and in-store shopping become further interconnected, the omnichannel retailer is feeling further pressure to create an in-store experience that will equals if not exceeds the online experience. Retailers at the cutting edge, such as Carrefour and Intermarch in France, are leveraging the ability to imagine and plan for different types of situations. They can “test” through simulation of various shopping experiences and even customize the experience by store location –empowering local stores to make decisions -- from lighting to store layout --that will best appeal to their own customer base
 
Brands and retailers know that it is survival of the fittest in a highly competitive marketplace, where consumer is king—or queen. Those that properly prepare before going to market, guided by the intelligent use of technology to virtually “predict” customer response, and focus on how they deliver the ultimate shopping experience with products they want, will gain the customer loyalty they seek.