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Since 2015, the line of seasoned retailers like Diesel, Gymboree, Rockport, Brookstone, Payless, and others who have filed for bankruptcy or gone into the sunset have become a bleak infographic.

The new direct-to-consumer model (DTC), which comes from pioneers such as eBay, Amazon and Alibaba and will supply companies such as Warby Parker, Casper-Matratze, Taylor Stitch, Freshly, Porter Road and others in the future, hits consumers face to face to face their smartphones and laptops.

The most accomplished DTC marketers watch their screens in real time and perform A / B tests on the go – the striped shirt compared to spot colors, lipstick compared to brushes, nude pink compared to YInMn blue. They run BOGOs versus discount codes, push for signups, and spread their learning across a range of real-time hooks.

Instead of thinking quarter to quarter or week to week, DTC marketers think moment to moment. Because consumers shop from moment to moment.

Time has come and a single hesitation can be fatal.

Due to the lower marketing costs for newbies who enter established markets thanks to a "free" Internet, new DTC competitors have increased in the areas of consumer goods, fashion, beauty, home textiles and practically every category. Even sleepy categories like mattresses and glasses got a wake-up call that turned into a fire alarm. Some traditional brands have burned down.

Direct-to-consumer also threatens shopping centers as consumers conduct their retail therapy online. (In our house, especially during the shutdown of COVID, it's easy to assess stress based on the number of Amazon and FedEx packages stacked at the front door.)

To understand what's really happening, it's time to take a look at the mother of direct customer Amazon dot com. "(Everything) that Amazon does is data-driven," Cheryl Wischhover writes in a Vox article. "When they made a decision about the structure of a detail page or the structure of the browsing experience on the website, everything was A / B tested."

"They are running 10 different versions, testing and choosing the version that is most popular with consumers," said John Ghiorso, founder and CEO of Orca Pacific, a consulting firm for companies that want to sell successfully on Amazon. This ultimately led to Amazon developing its own products in some industries, which contributed to the idea that brands were dead.

But companies without customers are not brands, but simply companies on the advance. Without history, generics are meaningless in themselves. (Traditionally, Amazon builds its own brand house.)

Old habits are hard to break. Advertising is cult and it is difficult to break away from traditional marketing norms. If 90% of consumers today view advertising messages as 100% lies, it's time to rethink this.

The five-star revolution

Without question, everything tends to give five-star ratings. (Spend $ 10 million on a Super Bowl spot? Or $ 10 million on customer reviews? Don't ask your advertising agency.)

Getting user reviews affects everything. Not only product quality, but also sales, delivery on the doorstep, customer service and follow-up to ensure that customers are satisfied, and (then) persuade your happiest customers to take the time to review them.

Tracking these customer moments is more motivating than tapping into the traditional customer experience. While the convention was to get products in the pipeline and watch them run, today for most companies this process doesn't go far enough.

And none of that means you're giving away your $ 10 million advertising budget to influencers.

To get great reviews, you may need to tweak your CRM, hire more empathic people, update your packaging, or take a close look at the analyzes that affect all of these decisions.

One approach is to focus on zealots and potential zealots. Your zealots will tell you what's important to them. Potential zealots are the low-hanging fruits, which can have points of friction. These two cadres can strengthen your focus and achieve timely results.

"The people who know how to combine the true promise of their brand with their products in a seamless experience are the ones who win at DTC," said Peter Sena of Digital Surgeons. “Ultimately, the way it comes together is due to fire. If I can buy it on Amazon, I have no reason to buy it directly. The only differentiator is experience. "

That said, if you are hit directly by the consumer, you are the main reason.

IRL experiences (in real life) have gone bad. Tons of deliberate marketing can be derailed by grumpy or upset ground staff. Brilliant examples of community have risen, been celebrated and then put on autopilot. Just ask Sears.

Brick-and-mortar retail lives on

But retail is far from over.

Japanese buyers, for example, look forward to attentive customer service in their bricks and mortar. Therefore, online sales for Japanese consumers are not as popular as in the United States. In fact, there is even a Tower Records in Tokyo (do you remember them?) That sells records.

South Korean luxury department store The Hyundai is also improving its game. They asked Universal Everything, a London-based company, to invent a series of video artworks for a 30-meter LED video wall that covers the Hyundai facade in Seoul.

Luxury retailers know that what they cannot offer online shopping must inspire, transform and sell – a multi-sensory experience that inspires and inspires customers. And bring them back.

One thing is certain: friction points are personal, omnidirectional and moody. There is no universal solution. Performance marketing with all of its tactics for acquisition / retention / resurrection is annoying on your face and sometimes even unthinkable.

Another part of it could be mindset. Direct-to-Consumer is more startup, more entrepreneurial – these are not just keystrokes, but new companies with new technologies and new philosophies. More Tim Ferris than Jim Collins. The go-go-go entrepreneur is agile, proactive, looking for partnerships, workarounds, and deliberately building to break things. The new world thinks in bit torrents, the old world thinks in sales talks.

Manager, manage. They traverse the heavy burden of hierarchies, existing channels and existing relationships and at the same time twist the handles of existing thinking.

The old is massively disadvantaged by the new.

Ultimately, these interactions only reflect changes in consumer habits, IRL changes that anyone who wakes up with the plethora of emails, Facebook, Instagram feeds, and Amazon Prime (good morning, Alexa!).

The best companies will design and build an ecosystem that hits their consumers at every point of contact. You will be online and on the street. They will be multi-channel, multi-sensory and multi-directional. If they survive long enough to give it a try.

CUT TO: A small room in a distant place that could be Bucharest, Dublin or Trinidad. Wall-mounted computer monitors cover real-time IRL. The screens are panoramic and filled with graphics, charts, streaming numbers, sentiment analysis, click rates, mixed data, and hot and cool zones. Artificial intelligence and learning machines are both active. Every monitor has its own people, employees move between screens. The room is a tumult, voices deliberate, feverish, screaming numbers. Fingers work keyboards. In the back of the room, in a dark corner, a woman overlooks the scene from her leather armchair, an oversized iPad on her lap. Her slim fingers mix diagrams across regions of the screen. Her head stands out as she looks up and stares at a screen. Your eyes are looking for results. She barks an order. The room answers. She smiles calmly. Success. Her face lights up as she looks back at her iPad and walks on. The future is already there.

Contribution to the Branding Strategy Insider by: Patrick Hanlon, author of Primal Branding

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