Meet The Omnichannel Shopper: Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere

Add savvy (‘unwilling to outsource their purchasing decision-making to either suppliers or retailers, ever again’) to the omnichannel shopper and you have a major shift in  power to shoppers that choose how they interact with brands. Moreover they come complete with influential decision-making information readily available at their fingertips. Ignore at your peril...

Traditional channel management
The brand and retail ‘purists’ that devote energies to the preservation of discrete channel strategies like grocery, pharmacy, geography or even retail, mobile and web,  are missing the New Tricks of  providing a unified customer experience irrespective of the channel, to consumers that reward those who allow them to use a combination of store, catalogue, call centre, web and mobile - simultaneously.

In other words, meeting consumer needs...?

Managing the omnichannel
It follows that suppliers and retailers need to reorganise to accommodate this new market need, perhaps replacing the current channel manager role with that of Omnichannel Manager. This will enable a ‘one brain’ focus on ensuring that channels are not operating independently, thereby reducing the risk that the brand is attempting to maintain separate dialogues with an omnichannel shopper, and losing that shopper to a brand that is capable of engaging with them simultaneously in all channels…

Comments invited: 
1. Should all channel managers report into, or be replaced by, the Omnichannel manager?
2. Any practical downsides to building an omnichannel strategy now, like today?                        

(tips: unprecedented times, survival priority, risk-of-change, lack-of-experience, forgetting that with ideas in times of great change, everyone has the same level of experience…)