Hyper Head of Strategy Bruce Gourley talks us through how a unified view of the channel will help deliver better experiences.
Global retail guru Steve Dennis hit the nail on the head when he said: physical retail isn’t dead, boring retail is.
If we know this, why is so much of it still boring? It isn’t because retailers are lazy, or because they don’t care. It’s a structural problem.
Physical retail used to be the preserve of Ops and Property teams, with a simple KPI: boost sales and lower operating costs. Over the last decade or two, it’s become more than a transactional platform. Physical retail is a media touchpoint, a brand experience, an acquisition tool, a retention play and obviously still a sales and distribution mechanic.
This means many more internal retailer teams are involved. Want to change the instore experience? Here are the stakeholders: HR for team management, Ops for basically everything, Sales because ‘Hey, we’re a retailer, remember!’ Marketing because brand and all things ‘Customer’ sits with them, Property because they hire the architects and oh, don’t forget IT.
So, yeah, it’s hard to get things done in retail. There so many deeply invested stakeholders. At Hyper we see this again and again when developing shopper marketing collateral for brands and setting up retail media networks. If clients don’t have a cross-functional process, it’s really hard to get execution to meet expectation.
We decided to focus not just on tools for better media management but also transforming retail teams. Hyper is now a way for retailers and brands to gain a more complete picture of the channel they are playing in. We help cross-functional teams understand, manage and measure their unified channel vision.
Yes, we can monetise audiences to produce revenue, but we also want to provide ways for retailers (and the teams involved) to improve the customer experience.
Working across teams within a retail client, it’s obvious each team usually has no idea what other teams are driven by and why. Talking about how teams can help each other meet their KPIs really exposes gaps in strategy. The ‘omni-channel’ concept is a good example – it isn’t a customer experience. Customers have an overall experience of your brand, omni-channel is an internal organisational approach.
Increasingly, we help clients build frameworks that show each channel’s role in the customer journey, and a vision of the experience all teams can work towards. These frameworks consider content strategy, media management strategy, content management and execution and, increasingly, a dive into data analytics to provide lessons and learnings.
Hyper aims to optimise retail performance by uniting teams with tools that offer a better chance of improving the channel experience. Because yes, boring retail should die.
hypermedia.co.nz
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This was first published in the 2024 September-October NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
