Showcase Your Brand With Showrooming for the Holidays

This holiday season is an extraordinary convergence of calendars and opportunities as the economy seems to have thawed for most retailers. However, with Thanksgiving falling on the first day of Hanukkah, the Christmas season is shorter than ever, forcing retailers to launch holiday promotions before Halloween, much to the dismay of many consumers.

So how can leading retailers extend the shortened shopping season to take advantage of the great opportunities this holiday season presents? In short, rethink showrooming. Retailers should be reconsidering their digital presence and embracing the opportunity to truly showroom their products, brands and promotions to offer a fully curated experience. E-commerce sales continue to grow steadily at around 15 percent annually; for retailers to stay relevant in this wave of consumer spending, internet and mobile shopping sites must continue to attract and retain visitors. Coupled with the challenges of the shorter holiday shopping season, retailers must generate greater value from their digital presence because it's a vital sales tool throughout the season.

Some retailers have certainly felt the sting of showrooming in the past. It's likely these retailers haven't used their websites to effectively differentiate their product offerings and define its value. As more retailers become aware of the challenges of resisting and adapting to showrooming, they're now beginning to design their digital presence around the creation of a seamless online customer experience to showcase their brand strategy. Innovative retailers include an extended product portfolio (including exclusive online products and sizing) and customer service capabilities to differentiate their products throughout all interactions with consumers. Perhaps this more complete view of a retailer's website should be considered "showcasing."

This perspective is vital this shortened holiday shopping season. By optimizing web and mobile platforms with holiday brand messaging, accurate extended product inventory availability, and other key differentiators such as customer loyalty entitlements, creative promotions and customer service assurances, retailers can create an ideal shopping environment earlier in consumers’ decision-making process. The shortened shopping season also requires extraordinarily accurate inventory planning to optimize how inventory is allocated throughout your go-to market channels. Where that doesn't result in alignment between product supply and demand, a sales associate's ability to use web and mobile tools will help them serve shoppers more effectively and drive a successful customer experience.

It's not easy to package (and keep current) all the dimensions of a retailer's brand, product and service strategy digitally, but it's what consumers increasingly expect when they visit a retailer's website. Merchandising teams will have to drive how product and pricing strategy is delivered across multiple selling environments. Store operations need to be included so that digital tools can be employed in-store to create effective and consistent selling environments.

Customer service and marketing teams will contribute to the overall digital experience and need to be responsive to any service feedback that might travel through the "twittersphere," for example. Websites and mobile capabilities need to be consistently available and performing sufficiently to ensure the experience isn't disrupted by the technology — and ensure retailers stay out of the news; no one wants a story about its website crashing on Cyber Monday.

So as we charge toward this year's holiday season, expect to see the most creative retailers leading with their digital presence to showcase their brand's products and services. Considering the challenges of a shortened selling season, the unpredictable weather this time of year and the whims of shoppers, they'll be glad that they did.

Liz Ebert is a consultant with The North Highland Company, a global consulting firm.