SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGING RETAIL
It’s providing valuable buyer data
Social media sites such as Pinterest and Instagram can provide just as keen an insight into what merchandise consumers want as the suppliers who sell the goods to stores, retailers say.
“Now consumers post every possession they have on Instagram — you know precisely what their taste level is,” Joel Teitelbaum, chief executive of the iStore electronics chain, said Wednesday in Toronto at a Retail Council of Canada conference industry panel on strategies for adapting to modern sales trends.
Teitelbaum said social marketing on those sites and Facebook is an important way to measure consumer demand and assess the movements of early adopters of retail and product trends. Artificial intelligence technologies such as image recognition are helping to make it even easier for retailers to determine what those customer preferences are, he added.
“When we are too vendor-driven we often miss out on those opportunities,” Teitelbaum said. “The vendor may have their own agenda, their own particular set of circumstances that was causing them to develop certain products or push a certain product onto retail customers.
So I think it is about shifting that risk back into the supply chain, which helps you have a better view of what customers really want.”
Bruce Dinan, CEO of Town Shoes, said social media has also sped up fashion trends and demands on the retail supply chain.
“You have to be there when these trends are happening,” he said. “You can’t sit back and wait and think you can see what is going to happen.”
A speedy supply chain and a continual investment in digital technology are also essential to staying on top of consumer trends at the retailer, whose banners include DSW, Town Shoes and Shoe Company, Dinan said. “Footwear hasn’t been real strong in e-commerce, but we definitely are seeing it moving fast, and it is becoming very important.”
Town Shoes replaced its e-commerce platform last summer and is now beginning to offer an online inventory assortment that is far broader than what its stores carry. This week the retailer launched a so-called online “endless aisle” of products — a showcase allowing customers to access a greater selection than what is available even at its 25,000-square-foot DSW stores.
Terry Lorenz, vice-president of purchasing in hard goods at FGL Sports, which operates Sport Chek, said the retailer only recently began investing in outside market research to get a better sense of consumer preferences.
That’s a contrast from just a few years ago when buyers at the chain “just kind of bought what we felt was right for the consumer,” he said.