How Technology Is Shaping Offline Retail’s Response To Shopping Micro-moments

Micro-moments that matter

Gone are the days where consumer shopping behaviour or the path to purchase could be characterized by a few large, well-orchestrated moments. Micro-moments are in. Micro-moments essentially the points in time in a customer’s purchasing cycle that become defining. Google terms these as “short bursts of activities that occur primarily on mobile devices”. These short bursts can significantly influence the consumer’s purchase decision and his/her brand choice.

In a given day, a consumer could traverse through various micro-moments as these across multiple devices – a PC, a tablet and a smartphone:

• What to buy – based on online research, peer recommendations (social), etc.
• Where to buy – researching online for nearby availability
• Brand choice – researching online for user reviews, service network, in-store interactions, etc.
• Deals – comparing prices online
• Rapid proliferation of smartphones is increasingly turning those small, everyday moments into moments that matter for retailers & marketers. Google provides some interesting insights:
• six in ten users check whether a product is available in a nearby store before visiting the store. This underscores the importance for retailers to make their store inventory discoverable by consumers.
• 76% of smartphone users who conduct a local search visit a store within 24 hours, and 28% of these searches result in a purchase.
• 89% of the consumers research online but buy in a physical store (Digitas LBI Connected Commerce Study 2015)82% of smartphone users consult their phones while shopping in-store, pulling down the barriers between online & offline shopping. Further, a recent Deloitte study mentions that of every dollar spent in retail stores, 64 cents is digitally influenced. It’s thus increasingly becoming critical for brands to be available in a meaningful manner when the consumers need them. If a brand is not present or not effective in how it responds to such micro-moments, it risks not just losing that particular transaction but even that customer forever.