Topic > How the Web Has Upended the Conventional Retail Model

The proximity of promotion in our daily lives is similar to that of water in the life of a fish. It's everywhere, but we often remain unaware of it: blind to the brightly shaded ads on the highway or the blazing neon lights outside a roadside motel. Our savvy personalities, however, have never been the target of traditional advertising. The best advertising efforts of the past 50 years were the ones we ultimately overlooked: the McDonald's television promotions passed on to us as youth, the Coca-Cola slide in left field at the AT&T stop in San Francisco, the slogans that some in a one way or another they constituted a greater protection against catastrophe than a fence. (“You are in very good hands,” “Across the nation is your ally!”, “As a decent neighbor, State Farm is there!”) In the old world, before Facebook and Google, there were no powerful ways to take targeted people who were looking for specialty items, so organizations that were successful offered items that spoke to large swaths of people and advertised reaching thousands and, in most cases, a whopping double that number of people. Organizations that carried out effective promotion efforts through these means tended to be of a specific type: restaurant networks, automotive brands, retail chains, protection bureaus, or brands under the umbrella of a larger commercial organization. Entering the advanced era, the web has overturned the conventional retail model, the one depicted by retail stores and brand advertising. The separation between buyer and seller never again forces a sale: a buyer in Japan could simply buy a watch made in Detroit, just as a customer in Ann Arbor could. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The Web has given buyers and retailers exceptional access to each other; It has never been easier for a buyer to find a seller who has what they need, just as it has never been less challenging for a merchant to find a customer who needs what they have. In this new world, FMCG organizations and advertising departments are experiencing a complete loss of motion. Promotion isn't about "pumping the boat" as such, but what is biting the dust are the brands that prevail in a world without the unparalleled access with which Facebook and Google manage each other's buyer and producer costs: brands that have succeeded correctly in light of the fact that Facebook and Google did not yet exist. As Stratechery's Ben Thompson says: "The biggest publicists on TV are cars; retailers; FMCG organisations, all with action plans that are at a very basic level undermined by the web. These are by and large organizations that are mass market, but the mass market disconnected from the web is a core market, and the web decimates mid-sized organizations that reward specialty organizations that have high separation and can charge a premium, and rewards monstrous scale organizations that can work globally, on a large scale impossible even from these monstrous organizations Furthermore, one wonders, when and if this advertising moves from TV, will its quantity be left?” — Ben Thompson, exponent Episode #104: Snap's Gingerbread Strategy Google and Facebook's promotions are a microcosm of this shift from mass to specialty markets. Never again will the cost ofSingle buyer is so high that reaching a million customers without a moment's delay is the main compelling approach to advertise. Currently, through Google and Facebook, specialized organizations can target certain people whose information reveals that they are prime contenders for said specialized item or service. Slant, a company that offers a suite of shaving items specifically for men of color, would have been left out to dry in the old advertising universe, in light of the fact that its advertisements would have been insignificant to the dominant portion of individuals to whom they would have been targeted. arrived. Currently, in any case, Bevel can target potential customers with Google ads with specific keywords; when I type in "shavers for dark men" on Google, Bevel is the first advanced result. Facebook also allows Bevel to target customers based on age, race and other factors that Bevel sees as characteristic of interest in spending money on a shaving package, particularly for men of color. If I were a dark man in my mid-twenties, had a Facebook account, and had already searched for razors somewhere online, Facebook's calculation would probably start giving me promotions for Bevel items. When I realized that those promotions were for something that could improve my life, I clicked on one, which would cost Bevel a couple of cents on the dollar, I made a purchase and, above all, I made it instantly and without regard to my geographical area . In the end, what Bevel would have paid to acquire my theoretical business would have been a small sum of what an organization like McDonald's had paid to acquire my real business, 20 years earlier, because it had bombarded me with constant television and radio promotions. that had allowed me to get my first look at the brilliant curves or I hear the words "I love it!" resonate in my living room. McDonald's was smart enough to understand that, given the existing avenues of promotion and the homogeneity of its product, the best way to succeed was to go deeply into mass advertising by focusing on and trying to retain customers in the long term and on large scale, but with a low cost for each customer benefit. Today, however, Bevel can target anyone with a web association in light of customer data, immediately acquire another customer, paying little respect to proximity, and concentrate more money per exchange than a partnership like McDonald's ever could - and the organization can do it at a small sum compared to the cost that huge brands once paid. This is the excellence of the web. That doesn't mean there's never been an incentive to take the shotgun approach of throwing promotions in front of huge gatherings of people and seeing what sticks. Coca-Cola and McDonald's used it to ensure that there are few pop machines on the planet today without Coca-Cola, and probably even fewer adults in the United States who don't perceive shiny curves as a picture of consistency. Basically, every time I find myself in an airplane terminal, I end up at McDonald's, not because it's the best, but rather because it's what I know — and I know it for no other reason than that. its image has been subliminally imprinted in my mind so frequently that it has become the default choice for nourishment when I don't know where to go, or basically have no desire to sit down and think about it. This is the intensity of the marking. To this day, McDonald's marketing efforts target huge and diverse audience groups, as its products target the average consumer. Watching TV promos