Comment Central

Mark Bower

Well, the online revolution has taken a lot longer to happen than many of us would have thought back in 1999. And that puzzles me. Then again, I am still running into businesses and marketing executives who (albeit increasingly shamefacedly) admit to ‘not really understanding this online thing'. Likewise, many traditional agencies still find themselves unable to properly embrace digital and make it a core part of their service offering. How odd. I'm occasionally tempted to wonder "Where have these people been for the last 10 years?"

In fact, the answer is rather obvious. They've been extremely busy running their existing businesses, of course!

I'm being flippant to exaggerate a point. Embracing ecommerce is potentially a painful, expensive, time consuming and probably frightening undertaking for many retailers. We are talking about fundamental organisation change in many cases - and that's not something that any business really wants to contemplate, given a choice.
But therein lays the rub. Consumer behaviour is now driving businesses to develop and change at a pace that they either can not, or are simply not willing to attempt. And many are failing to wake up to this realisation until it's way too late.

In the end, ecommerce (and the rise of the internet in general) are merely symptoms, as opposed to causes of this new consumer attitude. It's not about technology, digital television or the internet. It's a fundamental shift in consumer behaviour and expectations. The balance of power being wrenched from the hands of advertisers and media owners by a generation of information hungry, time poor, technologically savvy consumers who expect to be able to get what they want, when they want it, 24/7 and have little time or sympathy for any business unable to meet their demands.

And here's the crux. What we are seeing today is undoubtedly the thin end of the wedge. Maybe the only reason that some existing retail models still work as well as they do is that there are enough of us ‘oldies' left in the market place that still remember what it was like before the internet came along and changed everything. Now isn't that a scary thought?

Meanwhile, across the country, continue the (I suspect) almost ubiquitous client / agency conversations about digital strategy which tend to go along the lines of;

Digital Agency; "Why don't you take this more seriously, look at the potential? It's essential to get to grips with this stuff, because it's potentially the very future of your business that's at stake".

Client; "It's only 1,2,3,4 (insert your own number)% of our turnover, so our Board / CEO aren't interested - anyway, we are having way too much fun signing off our new TV campaign to bother with all that technical stuff".

Digital Agency; "Ok, that's obviously the case today; but have you seen how profitable that business could be? And, it could grow quite quickly to become somewhere in the region of 20%-30% of your total business - with a very flat cost base, resulting in the potential to generate very significant additional profits... AND anyway, it's not really a technical issue; it's more about how your brand understands, relates to and interacts with consumers in the coming years. The technical stuff is the easy part.... "

Client; "Ahh, but.... "

And off we go again. Our business is different. Our customers are different. Our products are different. We don't want to upset the salespeople in the stores. Well, my wife doesn't shop online, etc, etc.

And, undoubtedly most of that is true.  

No one said this was going to be easy. But, as the almost unfeasibly futuristic sounding 2010 draws ever closer, the question is, I think for many, one of survival.