A few winters ago, I and many other American women purchased the
Amazon Coat, a fairly affordable piece of outerwear that grabbed attention for
a hot minute. It’s an OK coat, but I keep forgetting the name of the
manufacturer. I doubt that I’m a customer for life.
اضافة اعلان
I’m not an oddball in this respect. One way that our lives
online have rewired our brains is that we’re more comfortable buying from an
unfamiliar brand. And those same changing habits may also be making us less
loyal to anything that we buy.
I was talking about this phenomenon recently with Josh Lowitz
and Michael R. Levin, co-founders of the research firm Consumer Intelligence
Research Partners. We talked about the ways that online customer reviews,
relatively low-cost social media advertising, and newer shopping destinations
like Amazon and Instagram have reordered how we evaluate and buy products. It’s
thrilling in many ways, and not so great in others.
Think about the ways that you might have bought something in the
Before Times — like, before 2010. Maybe you drove to your local hardware store
looking for a cordless drill, and it stocked only DeWalt models.
You trusted the store to sell a good product — or if you didn’t,
it was your only option anyway. That’s what you bought. The retailer essentially
made the choice for you, Levin and Lowitz said.
That’s not usually how we shop anymore. Instead of having that
solo choice, we can browse the gazillion cordless drills on Amazon from our
sofas and evaluate online customer reviews.
Startups like Dollar Shave Club and Warby Parker proved that a
clever product and canny advertising can turn us away from old standbys. We
don’t need the store to be the arbiter of what we buy anymore. We might just
need nudges on Instagram to persuade us to try new cookware.
In many ways, this is awesome. A one-person company might need
only a Shopify website, listings on Amazon or a Facebook page to compete with
multinational conglomerates. Powerhouses like Nike or Levi’s can’t rest on
their laurels for a century. We get more choices, are more open to trying
something new and great products can break through.
But like me and my Amazon coat, it may be harder than ever to
form a lasting relationship. Maybe you bought the vacuum cleaner that you saw
everywhere on TikTok, but will you ever buy from that company again? These
young companies, as Lowitz described, “succeed in making sales but not
customers.”
What happens if companies focus solely on selling us something
immediately, not on making us loyal customers? If companies need only to
persuade us to buy something once, I wonder if it creates incentives to make meh
products.
There is also a cost to choices. There are more chances for us
to get duped from bogus reviews or other online tricks. Sometimes, it’s a
relief to have only one option of cordless drills rather than having to pick
from an ocean of them online.
Molson Hart, the owner of the educational toy company Viahart
that I wrote about earlier this year, told me that he believed it was still
possible to build a great brand with lasting customers. It just takes fresh
skills.
Products that might have been drive-by purchases on Amazon can
encourage repeat buyers by tucking in welcome messages in the product
packaging, or reaching out to people who post raves on social media, he said.
The idea is to be in people’s minds, so that they’ll come back
for another purchase, leave a positive review on Amazon or both. (Not all
customers love these tactics. And some Amazon sellers go too far by offering
gift cards in exchange for reviews, which is against the company’s rules.)
“Whether it is a store, Shopify,
Amazon, a billboard, an
advertisement ... whatever. If you can get people’s attention and get them to
think your product is good, you’re creating a brand,” Hart said. “It doesn’t
matter how you do it.”
We don’t usually step back and think about why we buy certain
products. When we do, it’s remarkable how much we’ve changed, and all the ways
our habits have bent the shopping world.
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