Point of View: Coach

When this post was written, the Coach homepage featured a zippy tune from Mandy Moore ("I Could Break Your Heart Any Day Of The Week) coupled with a brief video featuring shoes.

I've mentioned how e-commerce is likely to evolve ... becoming a hybrid of e-commerce, social, mobile, and media, with heavy emphasis on media. This is an example where media begins to become the dominant point of view.

Again, I'm not saying these strategies work or do not work. Instead, I'm asking you to think about how these strategies apply to the businesses that you manage.

Point of View: Cordarounds

Check out the website of Cordarounds, a Bay Area purveyor of pants.

This might be a business model that violates both the best practices of the catalog industry and of classic e-commerce home page design.

As you know, I'm not advocating that you should or should not execute the strategies of the companies I'm sharing with you. Instead, I'm asking you to consider if there are elements of these businesses that are appropriate for your business. Cordarounds is a business that clearly does things differently, including manufacturing of only a few hundred items before moving on to the next item.

What might you learn from their branding/positioning/execution?

Point of View: JCPenney

JCPenney has a whopping 782,000 fans on Facebook (vs. about 4,000 on Twitter).

One of the ways they differentiate themselves from others is their "Weekly Obsession", where Penney features certain items on a weekly basis.

Here's another tip. It's a lot cheaper to have a conversation with customers via Facebook than it is to tell customers what to purchase via a catalog --- assuming you have the ability to obtain a mass of fans on Facebook (hint: not easy, not easy at all).

It's interesting to see the evolution of marketing. JCP was the final holdout in the "Big Book" world of catalog marketing. Of course, today, the website is the "Big Book".

We've gone from big books to targeted catalogs, targeted catalogs to websites, websites to e-mail campaigns, e-mail campaigns to search marketing, search marketing to social marketing, search marketing to mobile marketing. Things are branching out, folks. We no longer have the luxury of marketing one message to one big audience.

Point of View: Banana Republic

Banana Republic, a division of Gap, is also moving in different directions.

The trend, of course, is away from the static, old-school classic e-commerce experience.

For instance, give this link a click. You see the embryonic beginnings of a shopping experience that merges media and commerce, a first step away from the information technology based drill-down experience that is complemented with search. Banana Republic is offering you their point of view, complete with brief commentary from those who know more about Banana Republic than anybody else --- Banana Republic employees.

I can learn about trends, chino, and a new store concept.

Certainly, there are things in this style of merchandise and creative presentation that resonate with your business. Keep learning, watch what other folks are doing, experiment!

Point of View: 1-800-Flowers

Think of the brand name "1-800-Flowers".

The name represents a version of direct marketing that is thirty years old. But they are doing things on Facebook that are worth paying attention to.

1-800-Flowers has a unique Facebook Shoplet that allows you to purchase your flowers without leaving the comfy confines of Facebook. You can click on any of the icons on the wall to shop, or you can click on the SHOP tab and purchase via the Shoplet.

E-Commerce won't be about your website in ten years. E-Commerce, like many other things, will move "into the cloud", if you will. It seems to me like this is a really good time to test different strategies.

Point of View: Best Buy

In my Multichannel Forensics and Online Marketing Simulation projects, I repeatedly find that anytime a customer has an actual interaction with a human being at a brand, long-term customer value increases.

Best Buy is an example of a company that is working on making human connections easier in the online world.

For instance, their Best Buy Connect program helps illustrate how their "Twelpforce" assists customers who are having problems. For instance, @cookbookguy tweets the twelpforce with the comment "audio issues w/Samsung HTZ320&Toshiba46 plus INSIG bluray". Just one hour later, @agent1834 replies "What kind of audio issues? Syncing? Skipping? No audio at all?"

Now, granted, I have no idea if this exchange resolve the issue or not. Still, 24,285 folks are following the Twelpforce, and that's probably about 24,000 more folks than are following your contact center staff, right? And from time to time, problems are solved.

It isn't like Best Buy offers unique products ... you can pretty much buy Best Buy merchandise anywhere you want. So, this strategy creates a "point of view", a reason for Best Buy to exist in a sea of sameness. And it looks like Best Buy Connect is managed via Twitter and via Google's Appspot cloud computing platform --- hint, that means you get to go outside of your IT team to execute a marketing and customer service strategy --- that's a big deal!

Again, in all of my Multichannel Forensics and Online Marketing Simulation projects, I repeatedly find that when customers interact with an actual, live human being, long-term customer value increases. Best Buy is taking one approach to connect with customers. Certainly, there are lessons here that apply to your business --- especially for catalogers who staff a call center that is absolutely brimming with talent, talent that could certainly rival that of the "twelpforce".

Point of View: Kohl's

Kohl's has just shy of a million Facebook fans.

Here, we see how Kohl's facilitates interaction with pop television star Lauren Conrad and the Kohls Facebook crowd. The Facebook fan gets to learn all about her exclusive collection at Kohl's. A fan can flip through a design sketchbook, watch a behind-the-scenes video, see television commercials, get tips on how to wear the collection, shop her merchandise line, read her tweets, take a quiz, or view a YouTube video.

I've talked before about how the lines between e-commerce and media will blur. There's no reason that your garden variety e-commerce site couldn't have an online "television or media channel", complete with unique programming and content that surround the e-commerce/retail brand.

So take a peek at what Kohl's is doing, and see if there is something that resonates with your customers!

Point of View: Woot

You've probably heard of Woot. Management describes Woot in this way: "Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own."

Woot sells one item a day ... they sell the item until it sells-out, or until 11:59pm Central Time.

Now, I can hear the complaints already ... "But Kevin, we sell 100,000 skus, so that business model means nothing to us." Or ... "they don't accept returns, that creates a bad customer experience, we'd never violate customer trust like they do." Or ... "they use all of that goofy community stuff and blogs and that's just not us, our 62 year old customer simply doesn't care about that."

Oh. Really?

Ok, what about the Woot model is of use to the way you market to customers?

Could you have one item out of the 100,000 skus you currently manage that you sell every day at 1:00pm EDT / 10:00am PDT, for a limited time (say one half-hour), at a discounted price (say 15% off)?

Could the customer also get free shipping if the customer adds two other items to her order?

Could you create a special e-mail list that folks subscribe to, and only the folks who subscribe to that list get to have advanced notice of what the special item will be?

Could you offer an additional 5% discount at checkout if the shopper could demonstrate that the shopper "re-tweeted" the special item to her loyal audience of 296 followers?

Could you envision the free word of mouth you'd get from this program, word of mouth that is a lot cheaper than producing a 148 page catalog that is targeted to a customer you rented from a co-op?

Could you use this marketing channel to liquidate items that are in short supply?

Could you then hire me to analyze the performance of this new "marketing channel", to see how your customers interact with it?

Honestly, there's almost no urgency in e-commerce. Create a reason for the customer to interact with your brand on a daily basis!!

Point of View: Saks Fifth Avenue

Traditional marketing was all about executing campaigns.

A visit to the Saks Fifth Avenue homepage begins to point us in a new direction. Here, you get to see a brief story hosted by Diane Von Furstenberg (click here).

Now, what would you trust more ... copy in a catalog, or a video that comes right from the source?

You can literally see where all of this stuff is heading ... e-commerce and video and content and social and mobile all fused together.

Social Media is going to require an almost unthinkable amount of content to "feed the beast". As video and content and social and mobile and e-commerce fuse, it will be critically important for e-commerce merchants to be outstanding at content creation, and to be excellent at propelling that information "into the cloud". This becomes the "new marketing" that ultimately complements and then consumes classic direct marketing and brand marketing.

Point of View: J. Crew

This near-depression certainly taught us that the methods we were supposed to implement to grow a business profitably weren't effective. For instance, we learned that it is probably a bad idea to expand into retail and be saddled with huge levels of long-term debt when 20% of the economy falls out from under you ... turns out that fabled multi-channel customer that vendors and consultants told us to pursue couldn't cover the interest on the debt.

So for the next few weeks, we're going to take a peek at what companies are doing online to create a "point of view" ... what are companies doing online to differentiate themselves from the competition? I'm not saying any of this is going to "work" for you ... the goal of the series is to simply illustrate what other companies are doing.

Let's start with J. Crew. Take a look at their "Who's That Girl" feature (click here). Most specialty apparel retailers are essentially selling the same thing at the same price. J. Crew is taking a different approach, featuring a few of the creative folks, letting you get to know them and their point of view.

Humans make a difference, folks. In any Multichannel Forensics project or Online Marketing Simulation, I repeatedly find that long-term customer value increases significantly when a customer has an interaction with a real human being.

Here, J. Crew is introducing you to some of the human beings that work behind the scenes. If all things are equal, and you're buying the same item from Gap or J. Crew, maybe you buy it from J. Crew because you know a little bit more about the people behind the scenes, who knows?

It's certainly worth testing, isn't it?