Cyber Friday? Online Path to Purchase and Digital Shopper Research in the New Normal 

When we think of the holiday shopping season we almost immediately think of the Black Friday craze with people camping overnight and crowds stampeding into shops to grab half-priced bargains. 

Not in 2020. 

Scenes like this which were commonplace in 2018….

… are impossible to imagine when the socially distanced, in-store new normal of 2020 looks more like this:

The Shocking Footfall Mathematics of Social Distancing

Whereas in 2018, you might get 2 shoppers crammed into every square meter of the shop floor, with social distancing, shoppers must now stay at least 2m apart from each other. 

A rough calculation quickly suggests that the amount of shoppers retailers can physically fit in store this year is at least 5 - 6 times less than before. 

With the need to regulate how many shoppers enter and leave the store, the actual footfall could be 10x less than pre COVID normal. 

For retailers who have no online presence and rely heavily on Black Friday footfall to rescue an already significant decline in brick and mortar retail, social distancing will be disastrous. 

In our opinion, no single event will more starkly highlight the bricks v clicks divide like Black Friday 2020. So much so, that we believe, that in the new normal, Black Friday should now be renamed Cyber Friday. 

Time to sell your shares in any traditional brick and mortar retailer and go all-in on Amazon? Most likely - but all is not lost.  

The days of lines of shoppers waiting in line to stampede in-store to purchase may well be replaced with a new form of a line. 

The ‘click and collect’ line! 

What Does this Mean for Traditional Retail?

Regardless of whether you are a large multinational or a small independent retailer, the implications of the pandemic are immense. But it is not all ‘doom and gloom’. 

Brands that have acted decisively and digitized their offering with a customer-centric approach are not only surviving the pandemic but are, against all odds, growing their customer base and their revenues. 

Walmart is the perfect example of a brick and mortar retailer who rapidly embraced the accelerated digital transformation. Their online sales increased by 74% in the first quarter placing them strongly at number 2 only behind the online giant Amazon. Who would have thought that back in March 2020?

“The Walmart U.S. online surge lifted overall comparable sales, which also includes sales at stores open at least one year, 10%, Walmart’s best performance in almost 20 years.“ ( Source: Fortune ) 

But the digital success is no longer only exclusive to large multinationals. Small retailers are also embracing digital growth. With platforms like Shopify businesses can open their online stores virtually overnight and fully trade online in less than a week with delivery and collection options all built into the platform.

Cyber Friday? 

A recent survey from Google found that “More than a third of U.S. shoppers who normally shop in store for Black Friday say they won’t this year. And half of U.S. shoppers say the pandemic will affect how they’ll shop for the holidays this year.”

Additionally “53% of shoppers that plan to shop this season said they’ll choose to shop at stores that offer contactless shopping. And 47% of planned shoppers said they’ll use options to buy online, pickup in-store/curbside pickup” ( Source: Google )

The longer COVID drags on the more shoppers will want contactless but local shopping options and Click and Collect offers a lifeline to many struggling retailers. 

Traditional retailers everywhere urgently need to evolve to a digital, mobile-first, multi-channel new normal. It’s easier than you might think with a plethora of platforms out there such as Shopify that can have you online in days. But what happens when your eCommerce investment isn’t converting as well as you hoped? Or what do your customers even want in the first place? 

At Indeemo we have seen a huge increase in online qualitative research projects since the onset of COVID. From mapping online customer journeys to helping brand beta test ‘Click and Collect’/ Pick Up services, we have witnessed the huge shift towards ‘online first’ approaches. 

In this article, we explain how you can remotely research your shoppers to understand their new needs and challenges and design an omnichannel, contactless shopper experience that will help you take full advantage of the end of the year shopping season that lies ahead. 

How Remote Mobile Ethnography Can Help You Understand The New Normal?

So you know your shoppers are spending more time online, but how do you target them effectively? And when you do, how you get them to convert?

Having the fundamental understanding of where your customers find information about your products/services, how they compare alternatives, and what influences them is key in helping inform your ‘New Normal’ growth strategy. 

Looking at your online store or Google analytics can give you a broad insight into your audience but lacks human connections. With camping outside the store being completely replaced with Click & Collect or digital queues the interaction with the shopper is reduced to a bare minimum, making any data gathered very impersonal and disconnected from your shoppers. 

This is where Mobile Ethnography steps in. As in-person ethnography is physically no longer an option or deemed unsafe, the agile and contactless capabilities of both remote Mobile Ethnography and asynchronous, longitudinal Mobile Diary Studies can virtually place you right at the intersection of your customer, their context, and the moments where they buy and experience your product or service. 

The Indeemo app and platform can give you a periscope into the lives of your customers. Pioneering the human to human research it allows you to gather rich insight that will help you make sense of your analytics and understand the new path to purchase and customer journey. 

This unique, remote capability will give you an in-depth understanding of their ‘in-context’ and in-the-moment behaviors without the need to travel. It gives you real-life video proof of what customers need and how to best meet and exceed their rapidly evolving expectations. 

It helps you remotely walk in their shoes, map their journey, and see your business from their perspective. 

Leveraging the power of in-the-moment, behavioral data capture, with Mobile ethnography you can gain an invaluable insight into your customers’ multi-channel purchase journey. 

Multimedia uploads help you better understand their consideration process and follow every step of their decision-making journey.

Additionally, with Indeemo’s mobile screen recording capabilities, you get to see exactly what their online journey looks like and listen to it narrated from their perspective. This allows you to map, design, and optimize your purchase journey in an agile and data-driven manner. 

Witness exactly how your shopper navigates the digital new normal - not as some complex visualization on some BI data tool - but as a video of a real shopper behaving naturally and giving you the human-proof you need to improve your e-commerce offering. 

From interacting with your or your competitors’ products to consuming content to shopping online, you get to remotely witness what touchpoints they like or dislike, what content resonates with them (or not), and how they navigate your website/app. 

Furthermore, our Experience Graph capability enables you to mathematically plot the highs and lows of their journey so you can quickly zoom in on the touchpoints that fail to convert and watch videos proving why. 

No more unexplainable falling NPS numbers. With Indeemo, you get a video or screen recording showing you why. 

Transitioning To Mobile Ethnography

When layering Mobile Ethnography on top of your existing qualitative research stack, you need to evolve your research approach and think mobile-first. 

Trying to implement outdated approaches that worked with older technologies or traditional methodologies will not yield the best results. 

Use video to allow your customers to open up about their experiences, dive deeper into their feelings, and share not only their conscious thoughts but also their in-the-moment feelings helping you gather more insightful and contextual feedback. 

Watch them shop with a point of purchase videos. See them navigate with mobile screen recordings. 

Don’t just watch it. Engage! The probing options within mobile ethnography apps like Indeemo allow you to have a remote dialogue with each respondent and get an even better understanding of their motivation and split-second decision making. 

This gives you the flexibility to keep tasks open-ended for all respondents while being able to personally and privately engage respondents 1-1. This is extremely powerful when you need to get under the skin of what truly motivates them. 

In a world where big data and AI promises to algorithmically read the minds of the crowd, at Indeemo we believe that real breakthroughs happen when brands go back to basics and connect with their customers one to one and truly tune in to the context of the individual. 

And yes, we absolutely believe that when it comes to nuance and context, it still takes a human to truly understand a human.

Relying solely on the anonymous trend of the crowd to make your decision making, especially in a forced digital transformation as we're in right now is, in our opinion, investing in partial data.

In order to de-risk your digital transformation investments, you must augment that AI-sourced, anonymous big data with authentic, video-based, real-life, human behavior, proof. 

Let us transition your research to the new normal. 

That accelerated digital transformation everyone is talking about is happening right now, and it doesn’t just apply to retail and e-commerce. It applies to everything - including research. 

At Indeemo, we’ve been pioneering remote, digital transformation in research since 2016. We're experts at this and our experienced team of strategists is standing by right now to help you evolve your research for the new normal. 

Not only do we provide you with a category leasing platform, but we also help you brainstorm approaches, design your tasking, plan your research, figure out recruitment, train you, and set up your online qualitative research project in a matter of days. 

It's quick to activate and extremely cost-effective and it’s disruptively impactful. 

Get in touch now and we will get back to you ASAP to set up a quick call. 

Contact Us

US Toll Free: +1 888 917 7480

UK: +44 (0) 845 528 0870