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For First Time Purchases, Consumers Prefer In-Person Experiences

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Danny Parisi

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This is the featured image caption
Credit: This is the featured image credit
For products that a customer has never purchased before, 50 percent of shoppers opt for in-store retailers. When buying something for the first time, customers prefer to make purchases in-person…

Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.

PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.

In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris

For products that a customer has never purchased before, 50 percent of shoppers opt for in-store retailers.

When buying something for the first time, customers prefer to make purchases in-person over online by 20 percentage points.

Salesforce wanted to examine the differences in customer preferences between online marketplaces such as Amazon, retailers and brand stores. What the research found was that customers like to purchase items from bricks-and-mortar retailers when buying something unfamiliar, but they prefer buying from online marketplaces when seeking something they have already bought before.

Bricks-and-mortar

The modern retail landscape is a constant push and pull between retailers, brands and online marketplaces such as Amazon.

Customers regularly use all three, but for different reasons and in different contexts. To understand more about how consumers navigate between these three, Salesforce surveyed thousands of shoppers across six countries.

What the study found was that for products that a customer has never purchased before, 50 percent go for retailers and 31 percent opt to buy via online marketplaces. However, for products that customers have already bought before, 47 percent go online and 34 percent prefer retailers.

First time vs. repeat purchases. Image credit: Salesforce

What this means is that customers prefer the ease and convenience of shopping online for things they are already acquainted with, but desire the in-person experience of examining something before purchasing if they are less familiar with it.

Other findings from the report show that mobile is more useful to customers as a research tool than for actually making purchases.

Eighty-three percent of shoppers aged 18 to 44 use their mobile devices to search for products while in-store, however only 18 percent of shoppers use their phones to actually make purchases.

Shopping Habits

Luxury brands are aware of this trend and have begun tailoring both their online and in-store experiences to have the same level of personalization.

For example, Swiss watchmaker Hublot is unveiling a digital boutique that aims to make the online shopping experience more compatible with what customers would see when going into a physical store.

The Hublot Digital Boutique allows any customer the ability to discuss the intricacies of different products with Hublot sales associates in real time, just as they would if they went into the store. The digital boutique is part of a larger trend in physical retail that sees brands more closely integrating their online and offline experiences.

Mobile shopping. Image credit: Salesforce

In-store mobile tools have also become quite common. For instance, British apparel and accessories label Mulberry has teamed up with Tulip Mobile to overhaul the brand’s in-store experience.

Together, the two companies will focus on using mobile tools to improve the bricks-and-mortar experience for customers by supplying employees and sales associates with technological tools. Tulip will help Mulberry roll out a number of new features using these tools to streamline how customers shop and checkout

Reposted with permission from Luxury Daily.

Danny Parisi
Danny Parisi

Staff writer at Luxury Daily, New York.

Bio Not Found

RETAIL

For First Time Purchases, Consumers Prefer In-Person Experiences

by

Danny Parisi

|

This is the featured image caption
Credit : This is the featured image credit
For products that a customer has never purchased before, 50 percent of shoppers opt for in-store retailers. When buying something for the first time, customers prefer to make purchases in-person…

Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.

PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.

In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris

For products that a customer has never purchased before, 50 percent of shoppers opt for in-store retailers.

When buying something for the first time, customers prefer to make purchases in-person over online by 20 percentage points.

Salesforce wanted to examine the differences in customer preferences between online marketplaces such as Amazon, retailers and brand stores. What the research found was that customers like to purchase items from bricks-and-mortar retailers when buying something unfamiliar, but they prefer buying from online marketplaces when seeking something they have already bought before.

Bricks-and-mortar

The modern retail landscape is a constant push and pull between retailers, brands and online marketplaces such as Amazon.

Customers regularly use all three, but for different reasons and in different contexts. To understand more about how consumers navigate between these three, Salesforce surveyed thousands of shoppers across six countries.

What the study found was that for products that a customer has never purchased before, 50 percent go for retailers and 31 percent opt to buy via online marketplaces. However, for products that customers have already bought before, 47 percent go online and 34 percent prefer retailers.

First time vs. repeat purchases. Image credit: Salesforce

What this means is that customers prefer the ease and convenience of shopping online for things they are already acquainted with, but desire the in-person experience of examining something before purchasing if they are less familiar with it.

Other findings from the report show that mobile is more useful to customers as a research tool than for actually making purchases.

Eighty-three percent of shoppers aged 18 to 44 use their mobile devices to search for products while in-store, however only 18 percent of shoppers use their phones to actually make purchases.

Shopping Habits

Luxury brands are aware of this trend and have begun tailoring both their online and in-store experiences to have the same level of personalization.

For example, Swiss watchmaker Hublot is unveiling a digital boutique that aims to make the online shopping experience more compatible with what customers would see when going into a physical store.

The Hublot Digital Boutique allows any customer the ability to discuss the intricacies of different products with Hublot sales associates in real time, just as they would if they went into the store. The digital boutique is part of a larger trend in physical retail that sees brands more closely integrating their online and offline experiences.

Mobile shopping. Image credit: Salesforce

In-store mobile tools have also become quite common. For instance, British apparel and accessories label Mulberry has teamed up with Tulip Mobile to overhaul the brand’s in-store experience.

Together, the two companies will focus on using mobile tools to improve the bricks-and-mortar experience for customers by supplying employees and sales associates with technological tools. Tulip will help Mulberry roll out a number of new features using these tools to streamline how customers shop and checkout

Reposted with permission from Luxury Daily.

Danny Parisi
Danny Parisi

Staff writer at Luxury Daily, New York.

Bio Not Found

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