How to Become an Unbreakable Brand in the Dynamic eCommerce World

The world is in a constant state of change. And the same goes for the changing eCommerce world. So, if you want to maintain a competitive edge and long-term success, you’ll need to know how to become an unbreakable eCommerce brand.

Despite the ever-turbulent landscape of online retail, great challenges also present great opportunities for those sharp enough to seize them.

If you want to implement a new business growth strategy and need a strong partner, a sherpa, so to speak, to guide you through this uncertain terrain, Lingble is here for you.

Let’s climb the mountains of these dynamic eCommerce changes and how you can conquer the summit with our top tips.

Becoming an unbreakable eCommerce brand

The most important thing you’ll need to remember to become an unbreakable brand in the turbulent eCommerce world is your customer.

We’re entering the next horizon of online shopping, and getting real about who your customers are and what they want is a must for long-term business viability.

In the last five years, eCommerce sales have surged and are predicted to double in the next five years. But the biggest obstacle eCommerce brands face on their way to capitalizing on growth trends is themselves.

On average, eCommerce brands look at growth trajectories in an outdated fashion. They’re married to the idea of eCommerce simply being an add-on to traditional retail — basically, eCommerce as a side dish and not the main course.

But remaining wedded to this notion is a bad idea. You'll need an amicable divorce if you want to stay successful.

Remember, the customer must be at the heart of all business growth plans. To become an unbreakable brand means to become indispensable to the customer. So, eCommerce owners will need to make eCommerce the main entree instead of a side dish.

The bottom line is you’ll need to put digitally-driven retail at the center of your plans and create the right experiences that meet customer expectations. This will require investing in a deeper level of online and offline engagement with your target audience.

What unbreakable brands are doing now

Some of the biggest retail companies are jumping in on the ground floor of this eCommerce transformation and making big bucks while they do it. But for smaller companies, many are put off the idea because it’s new, scary, and they’re worried it comes with a hefty price tag.

Here’s what brands are facing in the changing eCommerce world:

A handful of emerging global trends are putting immense pressure on legacy business models to adapt or die.
The most successful brands are becoming unbreakable because they use digitally-driven strategies to meet and exceed customer expectations.
The brands that are avoiding making tough decisions and calculated risks are missing out on massive growth opportunities.

The key trends exerting pressure on brands to change their ways are reverberating globally. You’ll need a firm grasp of them to conquer this brave new world of eCommerce.

Top global trends exerting pressure on legacy business models

Rapidly changing consumer behavior
Highly competitive environment
Exceedingly high consumer expectations
Massive changes in technology in data collection
Less forgiving economic landscape

The best way to know where and how you can make changes to make your brand indispensable to modern consumers is through deductive reasoning. So we’ll cover the top questions to ask yourself so you can identify blind spots and opportunities for growth next.

Where to Shift Your Focus: Top Questions to Ask and Answer

When it comes to making your brand unbreakable, you want to think big instead of small.

Companies often make the mistake of going small and then going home. They’ll try to optimize their current product with a question like how can we improve it? Instead of asking, how can we make this better for the customer?

These questions may look similar on the surface, but you'll get very different answers once you dive into the particulars.

Question #1: Are you serving stakeholders or customers with your channel strategy?

Your channel strategy must be a considerable part of your overall growth plan. But, unfortunately, for many brands, channel strategy is an exercise in frustration.

You may roll out a new channel in a strained effort to catch up to customer needs. As a result, you end up trying to manage a crazy blend of disparate channels with their own dedicated data models and tech stack.

This is a terrible way to spend your time and your budget. You can’t create a smooth or scalable customer journey.

So, if this is something you’re dealing with, there’s a way to fix it. Instead of having a primary channel and then scrambling to add to it, pursue a headless channel strategy instead.

Headless channel strategy

In a headless channel strategy, no channel is favored over the other, whether on or offline. Additionally, you can fully integrate a headless channel strategy with the necessary inventory and customer management data for a more seamless experience.

On top of that, headless channel strategies have the added benefit of allowing you to manage inventory more strategically. For example, you can more easily stock inventory at the best locations based on your customer preferences instead of stocking inventory based on how the system is set up.

Question #2: Are you more focused on selling products than your customer’s needs?

Legacy brands have a significant benefit here. They’ve got far more data available on what customers want and expect from them. But, they don’t always do a good job of utilizing this data to serve the customer better.

So, consider where your brand is on this topic. Are you way more focused on selling more products than making your current best sellers indispensable to your customers?

For example, the company Mars Petcare has done an excellent job of selling premium pet food. But based on customer feedback and data, they branched out into offering pet care services.

If you’ve already got a product that’s selling well, shift your focus from selling more of it to serving and helping your customers with all issues related to that product. Better serving your customers creates more brand loyalty and gives you even more data that you can use to fuel future growth initiatives.

Question #3: Do your customers trust you enough to move into emerging markets?

Ambitious brands have always moved into adjacent markets. For example, retailers offering banking services, marketplaces selling entertainment, or tech brands moving into payment services.

But in today’s rapidly changing eCommerce environment, you’ve got to have a substantial customer base and trust with them to do this effectively.

An example of a company that did this effectively was the India-based eCommerce brand Flipkart. The company had spent considerable time building a substantial level of customer trust. Mainly, they invested in making it as easy as possible for their customers to access the brand digitally.

Flipkart started an innovative cash-on-delivery system since up to 70 percent of its customers didn’t want to pay online. By building this strong foundation of trust, Flipkart was able to move quickly into new, emerging sectors like the healthcare industry.

But what if you don’t have the same size advantages as a bigger brand like Flipkart? In that case, you’ll need to foster a range of strategic alliances and partnerships to serve a wide range of customer needs. Again, this will help you build and cement the trust needed to successfully branch out into emerging markets.

Becoming indispensable in the dynamic eCommerce world: Key takeaways

To become an unbreakable brand in these turbulent times, the customer isn’t always right. But they must always be first. So no matter what plans you make, if you put them at the center, you won’t go wrong.

But making the leap from doing the same old, same old to becoming a brand as dynamic as the changing eCommerce world comes down to taking a long, hard look in the mirror. Brands that fail to change often have one major problem in common — they aren’t putting the customer first.

Many things can lead to this roadblock — company politics, channel conflicts, short-term financial pressures, stakeholder agendas, etc. But to be an unbreakable success, you’ll need to evaluate your current baseline thoroughly.

Use our top questions to get started, then get in touch with us at Lingble to put a customer-centric plan for growth into motion.

Because if your website doesn’t have good UX or it’s difficult for people to purchase, how is that putting the customer first? It’s not, and your sales campaign will fall flat. And what about inventory and logistics? It would be terrible for your brand reputation to have a killer marketing campaign but no merchandise to back it up.

So, how can you ensure your website is up to par, and your warehouse is ready and ready to go? With guidance from the experts.