Even before the recession hit, consumers were powering into the web at a fantastic rate.  According to the Capgemini 'IMRG' index, web purchases were a staggering 75% higher in Jan 2008 than a year before.  The recession may slow this growth up and may quicken the trend - Marketing Week recently announced a projected a continuing, rapid rise in web sales in 2009 against a generally stagnant or declining retail background.  Great Britain has fallen in love with the web - and once 'through the looking glass' there will be no going back. 

All this means enhanced margins via reduced distribution costs and smarter inventory management - compelling bean-counter benefits!  But what happens once the immediate growth-bonanza tails-off and 'buying stuff on the web' ceases to be a novelty?  How can the web-buying experience become part of brand differentiation rather than just a parity trip? 

In the brave new web-world the consumer will - more than ever -   be inclined to prioritise his/her 'favourites', so the prize for establishing 'best in class' web experience in any given marketplace is disproportionately large for the victors. KSBR's recent research in a variety of sectors (property, mobile phones and electrical retail to name just three) suggests that every business which is actively 'digitising' the purchasing process and customer contact needs to think very carefully about how the online part of the brand  feels and how it links-up with the other elements. This paper is a 'cooks' tour' of key learning from hours of focus groups, web-useability studies and other research processes.

1) Connectedness: E-commerce isn't just about the 'e' part

It's tempting for cost reasons to think that a 'pure' web transaction with no human service component could be engineered: browse, buy and await delivery.  But life is never this simple.  E-commerce which fails to link up seamlessly with the other touch-points risks first baffling and ultimately annoying the customer. This is massively apparent when talking to consumers about the expected relationship between the 'e' part of the buying experience and the retail part where there are still shops involved, or telephone backup where there is (or should be!) a call-centre in the mix.

For example, in the mobile phone & electricals markets, choosing the right product and the deal is inherently complicated and customers often fear making the wrong decision - so their natural buying-mode is to alternate between web-based research and human (call-centre) contact.  However good the web design experience, it will primarily be the human element which decides their feelings about the brand.  To be more precise, the degree of seamlessness between the human part and the machine part is what consumer senses.  So when they have registered interest on a website they increasingly expect the person they talk to in a shop or callcentre will be able - rapidly and without fuss - to call up their details and demonstrate intelligent awareness of their web-search and their previous history as a customer. The best web practitioners  already deliver this - but not all can!  TM Lewin (the shirt people) and Screwfix (wholesale building materials) may not at first sight appear to have much in common, but when it comes to web + callcentre integration they are both shining examples of how to 'do it right' - both receiving 5-star customer accolades in KSBR studies.

2) Failsafes and the projection of 'Honour'

One big hold-back that many consumers still have about larger / riskier web purchases is the 'what happens if it's not quite right?' question.  (Trousers one size too small?  Colour not quite as advertised?  Quality not up to snuff? - we have all been there and so have they!)  The customer has to see - quickly and affirmatively - that there is a 'backstop' - for example that returning or changing the product will not be a hassle.  Along with this goes the vital factor called 'looking and sounding honorable'.  If anything, the old fashioned virtues have to shine through on the web even more than in other arena's - because consumers don't yet feel the confidence in web transactions that 40 years of consumer-rights legislation has made them feel about buying from shops.  Some of the best  e-comms websites have - paradoxically - an almost 19th century tone when it comes to projecting the integrity of the the brand - and they aren't wrong to play this card.

3) ‘Magic-ing' the online experience

It's hard to pin down what precisely makes one website more pleasing to use than another, but when a particular site really impresses a customer they tend - naturally - to gravitate back to it.  Conversely, all studies show that patience is limited and a customer who feels 'lost' or annoyed is likely simply to dump your site  and move to a competitor's.

Navigation and customer segmentation: Navigation is the 'wiring diagram' of any website - so how can something so basic feel like 'magic' to the customer?  One answer lies in segmentation.  Any large brand by definition serves multiple customer segments.  Customers from each segment should ideally feel 'acknowledged' in their own right and be able to find their ideal web-route easily and rapidly, without being forced to jostle against other segments or being made to like feel second-class citizens along the way.  This starts from a strong grasp of the different customer-types your brand is engaged with and their likely priorities - which in turn means taking trouble to engineer good dialogue between web developers and the researchers.  Especially useful are research techniques which create high customer engagement and which graphically bring to life segments - so that they enter the bloodstream during the web development process.

Visual ergonomics

For two decades or more  'design', 'designers' and their works have been celebrated in our culture: from Norman Foster's Gherkin to the iPod Touch we now know about this stuff and have an instinct for the way things should look and how they should 'handle'.  Without going into massive detail we'd observe that whilst many e-commerce sites are still very clunky, the best are now merging a distinct visual style with the features customers have wanted for years, such as 3D product display  video demo's and 'slider-bar' price comparisons.  When these elements are merged with distinctive graphic style and feel  it's the equivalent of sitting down in a Marcel Breuer designer sofa as opposed to parking your backside on a mass-produced cafeteria stacking chair.  Both serve their purpose but one is a pleasure to use - the other merely functional.


Brand feel, brand tone:

Even after the digital revolution, the strongest brands are still those which attach themselves publicly to the pivotal emotions which drive the category - so the strongest chocolate brand is the one with the strongest notion of indulgence and pleasure, the strongest detergent brand best embodies caring for the family, the strongest bourbon brand best embodies the idea of 'unwinding' and so on.  It's striking how the 'surefootedness' or otherwise of brands in other media is now translating on to the web, as production-values rise and advertising-led style and

content comes into the web-space

Building-in the 'extra'

Rightmove's excellent property-search site has become the out-and-out industry leader by doing a lot of the above - it has 'best in class' content and feel - and is supported on the ground by a massive network of local estate agents who know what you mean when you ask them about it on the phone.  But there's one other thing that Rightmove got to before anyone else in this market - which was offering customers a bit of extra info. about the areas they were looking at: the schools, house price trends, shopping, leisure facilities etc.  This insider knowledge was one reason why Rightmove pulled ahead of it competitors - and is the exact equivalent of the many helpful extra features eBay offered (ratings for buyers and sellers, automated reference to 'similar items' and so on) and which helped it to all but destroy most of its competitors in the early days of the on-line trading site.  Experian is another example of an online brand which is far ahead of all it competitors in this regard.

Customisation & tailoring

Whenever we do web-experience research with customers the demand for internet-driven customisation grows: the expectation that the brand or organisation can respond to all this 'info download' with products / services / advice tailored to the customer's particular needs or circumstances.  The more information is asked-for at registration the more annoying it is if the brand then fails to refine its message - the more irritating to receive 'carpet bombing' type spam-mail by return.  So the big opportunity is 'Customise!' and the big warning is 'Don't insult with mass-messaging when you've implied a more personal kind of interest!'.

5) Making superior e-experience the focus of brand-comms

In this short piece we deliberately haven't distinguished between 'born-on-the-web' brands and  'born- outside-the-web' brands (which is still most of them).  However, it's interesting that the pure, web-born brands such as Rightmove and eBay do seem to have a way of getting the gladiatorial contest done and sorted pretty fast.  In most web-born sectors the brand leaders emerged pretty quickly after and initial period of milling-around, driven by superior online experience.  What we are now seeing in  some web-born areas is the web experience itself being featured in brand-comms. as the key point of difference.  For example the approach of 'Confused.com' in the hard-contested online insurance market has recently been to 'demo' the virtues of their revamped site - all sliders and self-customising features - rather than simply to drive home brand name-check like some of their competitors (think Meerkats for instance!).  Likewise 'Experian' advertising showcases the online experience and in doing so makes a very powerful brand-leader case.  This may not be the whole destiny of online brand comms but to our way of thinking it's the exact analogy of the time spent in the past by brand leaders like Persil telling you about product superiority ('washes whiter') - before they moved on to a more emotionally-driven stance. 

Last thought then - the internet is still pretty new.  Whilst that's true, this is the time to a) build a better online experience than the other guy and b) shout about it when you have.  As people involved on the research side we don't feel that the integration between customer insight and web-development is yet strong enough in most companies, and this - in our view - is where it should all start.