Case Study
Retail
A consumer electronics retailer discovers where consumers make their decisions, and organises its assets to create an effective omni-channel customer experience to rival digital entrants.
Visioning Workshop
Customer Experience Design
Marketing Program
Channel Engagement
A 50 year old consumer electronics retailer is facing fierce competition from newly established digital-only entrants. The company faces both revenue and profitability erosion over recent years, and they took a worse dip during the COVID-19 pandemic. Manufacturers started utilising these digital-only platforms to sell directly to consumers. The CMO understood that digital marketing would be part of the solution, because many consumers evaluate products online. The CMO engaged Genova Digital to address the marketing budget allocation problem, and identify changes in processes and organisation that would make digital marketing a competitive advantage for the company.
We worked closely with the marketing team to study the consumer path from research and consideration to purchase and brand loyalty. Using our Decision Journey model, we identified that digital is critical: 70 percent of customers research and evaluate consumer electronics products online. Using clickstream data, the team found that 85% of consumers bypass search sites, and go directly to their local retailer sites to research products, with less than 10% bothered with manufacturer sites. The retailer website was however, not optimised to take advantage of this fact. The online store only displayed a fraction of inventory displayed in the physical stores. Product descriptions were uninformative to help consumers to accomplish their evaluation goals. These resulted in high exit rate on category pages in the online store.
The most important insight was that the most influential touch points at different stage of the consumer journey have varying effectiveness. For example, in-store interactions were not as effective during the customer’s initial consideration phase as when it’s at the sales closure phase. We moved the conversation from ROI metrics and budget allocation to designing a consumer journey using both online and offline channels. The overarching question became this: How could we precisely reach the right consumers at the right time?
"From the engagement with Genova Digital, we gleaned new insights on how we can better use our current assets to maximise marketing spend. Traditionally, marketing and sales are viewed as silos. Now, we see more opportunities to collaborate and serve our customer better."
To support the new marketing strategies, funds were shifted from paid media (radio, TV, online and print) to improve the website infrastructure and high quality content production (both online and in-store), smoothing the decision journey. Web placements were offered to manufacturers to boost product sales and promotions. Genova Digital also helped launched a customer experience academy for front-line sales representatives to identify accurately the stage in consumer decision journey and act accordingly during their interactions with walk-in customers.
"With the emergence of an increasingly discerning, well-informed consumer, the traditional funnel approach has to evolve to navigate the environment that is less linear and more complicated. We find the Decision Journey model more applicable in aligning all marketing elements to provide a true omnichannel customer experience."
Overall sales grew by 23%, and in particular, online sales started to gain traction in growth (105% year-on-year). The client committed to work on more marketing initiatives and customer experience training program, as they project higher sales using the new approach.
"Our team definitely took away a lot value from our engagement with Genova Digital. We now have tremendous clarity on what our priorities are as a business, and courses of action to build desired capabilities, to compete strongly with these new digital entrants."
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