The pandemic continues with us and will be present for several more months until a new normal between vaccines and contagion reduction schemes is reached. Still, while all this is happening, people continue to need to buy goods and services. We have seen new creativity in how they let us interact with the consumer, a new way of educating them both online and offline.
The interaction comes down to generating a consumer experience that translates into sales in some way.
The combination of online and offline is already essential. Online product search times are longer. The consumer is eager for more information, uses, and applications that they normally consume only on impulse.
Today we have a more informed consumer who tries to maximize his purchase in other horizons beyond what he thought would be traditional.
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In stores, we now see many new promotional materials with QR codes that allow the customer to dive into promotions, interact, view recipes, etc.
At the same point of sale, they are informed with the store staff and promotions, as we knew them with tastings, have become points of information and product promotion.
The actions in these transitional months that are vital for brands in consumer centers are:
- Have eyes and hands on the street, that they carry out a constant job of educating both the end customer and those in charge of the stores, that help to get better spaces, quickly inform about other initiatives that are being offered, creativity in communicating the virtues of the brand, etc.
- Have easy-to-use digital communication platforms, an omnichannel strategy that allows you to sell, communicate, promote, make the information reach the customer from different sources, and be consistent in this communication. You get to have a positioning that allows you to translate it into sales.
Both online and offline channels must have measurement parameters. Not all of them are in sales. They can be in the number of affiliates to the databases, the number of customers impacted, information gathering, and, of course, the hard numbers of sales volume.
The measurements must be consistent, weekly, biweekly, and monthly with comparisons and above all that they generate the necessary information for decision making.
We conclude that this 2021 will be based on creativity, cost control, being consistent in the promotion and education of the products, always focused on offering new experiences online and offline.