The steady rise of e-commerce has kept us talking about the process of shopping. We don’t talk nearly enough about why people shop (another Note) but you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a longform piece on how people shop. The Wall Street Journal ran one just this weekend and I gotta tell you: it was a little pointless. Showrooming, Webrooming, curbside pickup, BOPIS, BORIS, ISPU . . . this is insanity. Landlords: national tenants are making up acronyms in one hand to to divert your attention from the other hand where the card trick is really going on. The logistics of fulfilling customer orders in 2021 is a complex subject worth discussing. But the strategic question of how people shop has been answered: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because there is no such thing as bricks and mortar. There is no such thing as online. There is only omnichannel. You sell your brand whenever, wherever and however you can do so most efficiently and most profitably. Your brand is expected to be everywhere, online and real world. It may be more virtual than real but it will be both. There is no marketing and there are no operations because everything is marketing and everything is operations, and it is all a Customer Acquisition Cost. Instagram is advertising that you can shop in. Here’s the kicker: so is the store. Physical stores drive online sales and online activity results in instore sales. Even Macy’s— aka America’s Worst Retailer— has acknowledged that closing physical stores leads to a decrease in area online sales. [The title of America’s Worst Retailer rightfully belongs to anybody who cannot make millions with Rachel Schectman onboard. Fight me.] The customer expects the brand of the future to live everywhere, so all public activity from algorithms to collabs, from fake stores to real ones, is now a customer acquisition cost.
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