Repost from November 22, 2006, with slight modfication
Insulting, isn’t it? For me to suggest in such an inflammatory headline that pockets of decreased vision and intelligence could possibily flourish within the furniture industry.
Omigod! What an outrage! What heresy! And, oh, yeh, where is the outrage?
With the power of online shopping (fact-finding and discovery) — NOT BUYING!! — growing so exponentially, I am dumbfounded (maybe just dumb!) and befuddled over the gross misuse of the commercial power of the Internet.
Hey, the Internet ain’t your father’s sales-mobile! It's your snazzy, souped up platform as a destination to a self-qualifying shopper's search mobile.
The high touch, high feel factor of furniture demands that shoppers develop a comfortable point of reference — the butt test or drawer pull — to confirm or validate a buying decision.
But first they have to discern the best store to visit, and with costly fuel that precludes just driving around, shoppers don't want to be fooled online. And if they are, they ain't never gonna go back.
The challenge is howya gonna get 'em into the store when shoppers are seeking information and many retailers are delivering online sales patois that is usually warmed over newspaper bombast?
This is mercantile limbo. How low can they go? Remember, you can take the sale out of the ad, but can't take sale ad out of the retailer, even though online prowess becomes the wind for successful merchant sails.
Remember, all furniture is local, and that means virtually all furniture buying is local. So, when shoppers search for authority online, they dismiss sales drivel that they inherently know contains some kind of too-good-to-be-true catch.
Anyway, women are the decision makers, and they innately know what retailers (men) want with unrequited mercantile love.
So, how will retailers and their vendors comport themselves online to change the perception of home furnishings? Well, it won't be evolutionary. But, instead, the change will emerge from intelligent design. That means knowing what people (code word for women) want, and to be ready with the trusted information when they want it, and that’s all the time in full Twenty-four/Seven responsiveness.
InsideFurniture comment-meister and online marketer Mark Wax of SellPoint.net, observes:
“The next business downturn will be so vicious, forcing such monumental changes in the way consumers buy and act, that only the smartest, savviest merchants and manufacturers will survive. And that's the kind of merchant shoppers want to do business with right now and in the future, for sure.," Wax explains.
In a torrent of cheaply made merchandise flowing in from all over, how will consumers know the difference when they search and shop online. Believe me, they will because the smart merchants will become evident. Intelligent water seeks its own level.
Yes, shoppers will buy in a store, a significant fact that many furniture executives may not have appreciated and wonder why they are not generating sales online.
The nonlinear and counterintuitive merchants and vendors will succeed. Of course, we know Ikea is leading the pack in that arena, but what about the goods at the high end? How will those purveyors distinguish themselves?
They will have to do so when gasoline, as it should, goes to $5 a gallon and forces all of us to become more efficient. And as we do, the home will become more of a familial and friendship base, prompting primordial desires for damn good looking and functioning nests, our homes.
The future of furniture in the home will be in the plasma screen eyes of the beholders. And just where will be the night on the town? In a friend or family member’s home, where comfort and satisfaction reigns.
The experience will not be the plasma screen and the enveloping super electronics, but in the context in which the equipment operates and influences. And that is in our homes where the totality of experience is the message and experience that soothes and comforts us in a special place we known as our haven.
So back to the future: Competition on the false idol of low price, in a desperate race to extinction, will continue to compell simplistic followers. In stark contrast, leaders will breakaway and lead shoppers to better living, and that long journey begins with a short mouse click.
Make love online instead of R.O.A.R. (Retailers Obfuscate Authoritative Reason).
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Posted by: alonzoa | August 25, 2008 at 04:36 AM