Lockdown changed how we shopped.

Firstly, our shopping shifted online. And that habit stuck.

Secondly, we used to shop online as if we were in a physical store: browse, try, buy. But, in Lockdown we couldn’t go out, so we’d browse, buy, try, then keep or return. And that habit has stuck, too.

We’ve turned the retail journey upside-down. The decision-to-purchase has moved later – after we click ‘buy’. And the so-called ‘after-sales services’ (returns, support-desks, etc) have moved earlier – before we click ‘buy’. Today, customer experience starts before you’re even a customer.

In the online world one of the most valuable commodities for any business is ‘cookies’ – little packets of data about visitors. But changes in the data privacy landscape were ending brand access to ‘third party cookies’, and critical audience data was disappearing.

Pre-Lockdown, e-tailer sites were already well-established as the shopper’s go-to. As shoppers moved more-and-more online, brand-owners were seceding the ownership of more-and-more of their customer relationships to third-party e-tailer cookies.

Samsung saw the writing on the wall. So, they flipped the threat into a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

They’d sell their brand directly, own the customer-data, and retake control of their customer relationships.

As more moved their shopping online, the job of outreach marketing is to attract as many site visitors as possible. Once they’re there, our job is to pull them through to transaction, and lure them back: (Please refer to graph, Appendix, slide 12).

Profiling revealed Samsung.com was only driving transactions effectively amongst 'tech savvy brand advocates':

-Confident in their ability to find what they wanted

-Already sold on the Samsung brand, so happy to buy direct, instead of via third-party e-tailers

So, we examined every site touchpoint – what was working, what wasn’t. We ran two large-scale research programmes examining post-lockdown shopping behaviours, and 100+ depth-interviews with site visitors. We set up on-site qualitative analytics tools (eg. ContentSquare, heat mapping and Qualtrics on-site feedback), and explored optimisation initiatives.

We concluded:

-Functionally, Samsung.com wasn’t ‘sticky’ – there was little to engage ‘normal people’

-It was emotionally unrewarding – it was a passive, functional ‘order taker’ that didn’t actively drive conversion.

We realised our site experience did not reflect the post-lockdown online shopping behaviour of ‘normal people’.

We might be successful in selling product to the ‘tech savvy brand advocate’ niche. But, we weren’t successful in delivering brand experience for everyone else.