The Future Consumer is Omnimodal

Brian: [00:00:37] Hey there, Futurists. Brian here. Today, we have a special episode for you live from BigCommerce's BigSummit in Austin on August 29th. In this special episode, we're joined by Melissa Dixon, who's the Senior Director of Content Marketing at BigCommerce, and John Affourtit, who's the Senior Director of Strategic Sales at Attentive. And we released our new report. It's called New Modes: Redefining Personalization in the Age of AI, and we unpacked our key findings from this groundbreaking new research. I hope you enjoy the discussion.

Melissa: [00:01:14] Hi, everyone. Welcome. I'm Melissa. I'm so excited to host this session, which is also going to be a live podcast recording for our Make A Big Podcast. And I am thrilled to have three distinguished ecommerce experts here with me today. Brian Lange and Phillip Jackson are Co-Founders of Future Commerce, which is a retail media research company focused on helping ecommerce businesses create strategic vision. They create content for modern brand marketers to shape the future of their retail and DTC businesses. Brian is also the CRO of Future Commerce where he co-hosts the popular Future Commerce podcast. His passion for innovation and customer-centric strategies make him a valuable resource for brands looking to stay ahead of the curve. I can attest to that. I agree. Phillip has built and grown digital commerce for some of the world's most recognizable brands. He's a writer, a speaker, and a marketer with an engaged global audience of over 100,000 executives across channels like digital, print, audio, video, and immersive events. Welcome, Future Commerce. And last but absolutely not least, John Affourtit is the Senior Director of Strategic Sales at Attentive, the AI-powered marketing platform, and one of our sponsors for BigSummit where he has been instrumental in driving the company's growth and success over the past four years. With a deep passion for innovative technology, John leads strategic sales initiatives helping brands leverage personalized mobile messaging to connect with their consumers in powerful new ways. All right. So today's discussion is all about consumer behavior. And we're going to talk all about this next wave of ecommerce trends. So the ways that consumers are interacting with brands across channels and devices and how that's constantly evolving. So this session is anchored in research, specifically research that Future Commerce and BigCommerce worked on together. We collaborated to produce a new report. So before we dive into all of this data and all these details, Brian and Phillip, why don't you give the audience a little bit of background on our research and our goals and why we partnered?

Phillip: [00:03:36] Thank you so much for partnering with us on this research, and thank you for having us. Future Commerce, we, for the last 8 years, have been building a research and insights capability within the larger media brand of Future Commerce. So today we have always on digital commerce, digital programming, insights, research, and events to speak to people like you who are building the future of commerce. And you can't build the future if you don't understand where it's heading. So we see little glimpses of this in consumer behavior now. You've probably heard us say maybe on the podcast or you've said it yourself that the future is always here, it's just not equally distributed yet. And so we like to look at what are emergent behaviors around the consumers. So just a bit about the research. We believe that we're starting to see a shift of behavior, especially from the brand side as they're making investments in channels and technologies, but more so on the consumer side as they're falling into new patterns and online behavioral patterns. And what we hypothesized in the research was that they're shifting from an omnichannel shopping journey to an omnimodal shopping journey. And I can elaborate on what that means in just a moment, but as we did our research we found that really three sort of sets of psychographics emerged. The first is people like me who we call technostalgians, people who are sort of nostalgic for technology past, we're very set in our old ways. We like the way that we do things online, we like the brands that we shop and frequent. We have a mode of operation with them. We also have the scroll set at the very opposite end of the spectrum. People who are sort of raised with a certain style of emergent technology, and they're rapidly adopting the new and next thing. So we'll go down the rabbit hole a little bit here on that today.

Melissa: [00:05:35] Yeah. Brian, what would you like to add? Anything?

Brian: [00:05:38] No. I just think our audience is an incredible set of executives and leaders throughout the commerce ecosystem and throughout the world, really. And so the results we got back from this, it was really interesting to see what people had to say about how behaviors are changing among their shoppers and consumers. And I think that there are a number of different ways that people consume our content as well. We have seven podcasts. We send out newsletters three times a week. We release research like this and have executive gatherings and summits as well for people to kind of chat through some of this. And so to hear this feedback in a consolidated way and the way that we got it, I think it's going to shine a new light on how people are thinking about and changing the way that they shop. And actually, this is an interesting insight coming out of that survey. Shopping is by far the most common thing people do online. Four out of five consumers can't go a week without shopping, and 87% of the people who responded said that actually purchasing was in their top five activities of what they did with the Internet. So shopping is culture right now. Commerce is culture. We're shopping more than we actually are watching and consuming content online. That is wild. What a change.

Phillip: [00:07:07] We have some really great ways of teasing this data out in doing these sorts of studies, and the bigger insight that wraps it all up is what were cultural moments in the past that might have been must see TV. I grew up in an era of must see TV Thursday night. Anyone remember? Come on.

Melissa: [00:07:27] Right there with you.

John: [00:07:27] Sunday night.

Phillip: [00:07:29] Steve Urkel. Now it's must buy right now. I think there's a monocultural behavior around what is trending, what are my friends buying, and how fast can I be part of the trend and buy that too? And it's sort of irrespective of what it is that's being bought. It could be a makeup brush today, or it could be an insulated water bottle tomorrow. Stanley's over. We're on Owala now. The way that these trends turn over so quickly, it's not about the product. It's about being part of a movement. And so we'll see how that unfolds.

Brian: [00:08:03] I mean, I heard Bridgerton vibes walking on here. {laughter}

Melissa: [00:08:08] {laughter} Well and, Phillip, I do want you to elucidate that concept about omnimodal a little bit more. Can you explain that for the audience?

Phillip: [00:08:18] Sure. Let's define a couple things. So I've been in this industry now since 1998, so I'm an old guy. Of course, old guys talking about what the youths are doing, Right? We're a meme. I get it. But I remember when the term omnichannel first came around, and everything was going to be about omnichannel, and we had orchestrated solutions that put our products wherever the customer happened to be. There is a new modality emerging, and that is that the customer wants not just to make a product decision wherever they happen to be able to purchase a product or to harvest that intent to buy wherever they happen to be. So Omnichannel in the past might have been you need to be in wholesale, you need to be at Target, you need to be driving Instagram ads to your direct to consumer. You also should have a B2B strategy for more of these long tail wholesale doors. All of these things did equate to a wonderful and ubiquitous brand experience, but omnimodal is something different. A modal shopping mode emerges when people go throughout their day and they're inspired by their newest influencer or a new piece of algorithmic content that comes into their feed that they didn't specifically go looking for. And if they want to be part of that trend, they can purchase it right there in that moment. What happens after that is a lot of product research is happening in channels that we don't have direct control yet as brands and retailers of making sure that we're building content that's discoverable. So these datasets are going into things that are small language models, large language models, and there's no true means of discovery. We can't optimize our websites to be more discoverable. There's no true index. It's sort of fragmented. In the report, we sort of show where the first channels for these new modes of discovery and product research come from. One person we talked to did some product research around a certain type of a face lotion. Does this have sunscreen? All they did was take a picture of the back of the bottle. The bottle has a list of ingredients. And, well, wouldn't you know ChatGPT can look at a list of ingredients and tell you that there's no zinc oxide in this. Zinc oxide is probably the most common sort of an ingredient that would be helpful as UV protectant. This probably doesn't have it. Do you know the same customer can send an email to the concierge at this very high end brand and wait two weeks to get a response back? That brand is in every retail door. That brand, they're getting more immediate feedback in these new shopping modes, and I think that that changes the nature of how we're building our companies and how we're trying to merchandise our products at the point of inspiration, not just the point of purchase.

Melissa: [00:11:10] Well, that brings us right to our next insight because we have three key insights that really stood out as a result of this data. And this is the first one. It's essentially the idea that consumers have higher expectations and brands have more opportunities to really customize these user flows to meet and exceed expectations. So, Brian, I wanted you to dig into this a little bit. You already brought up the data point about four out of five consumers can't even go a week without shopping. I mean, I wouldn't know anything about that. But let's talk more about how these expectations are manifesting in that customer journey. What did you find in the study?

Brian: [00:11:52] Yeah. I don't know if we can go between bathroom breaks without not shopping. I think the really interesting... So the shopping journeys are, they're changing quite a bit. I think one of the things that we found that was super interesting is that the scroll set, which is the youngest generation, their mode of shopping is highly influenced by how they feel. And this is a challenge because, right now, context is collapsing. Right? People might be shopping on their phone while they're driving, hopefully not. They also might be shopping on the phone right after their dog throws up on the carpet. And so the challenge is being able to control the environment that people are in while they engage with your brand is hard. So this means that you have to have incredible experiences built that are easy to use, that are "frictionless." And I think this is an important thing to talk about because at Future Commerce, we do talk about friction quite a bit. There is good friction, and there is bad friction. Bad friction is often when an experience that someone has when they can't accomplish something that should be done by a machine that isn't being done by a machine well. If it's something that should be done by a person, by a human, like building a relationship or giving them good advice, then that's one thing. But when it's something that could be done by a machine or just easy to get through, the faster they can get through it, the more easily they can get through it, the better. In fact, 97%, as you can see here, of the scroll set that's that younger generation, said that if a brand's website is hard to use, they actually think less of the brand itself. And so that's actually significantly higher than the other two sets that we drew on. And the other two were at 89%. So it is a really big deal across all generations. But this new generation, if it's difficult to use, it's going to have a huge effect on them. They also said, 80% of respondents said that how they feel about a brand could change based on their mood, whereas the other generations were in the low sixties. Again, huge difference. As you start to think about how that customer journey can go, you need to know that if it's not easy to use, not easy to get through, not something that they can just click through and feel confident in, they're actually going to really struggle. It also had to do with recommendations. So recommendation's another huge part. All generations, all psychographics had issues when product recommendations were irrelevant. They said that irrelevant product recommendations are actually worse than having any recommendations at all. And it actually hampered them from making a purchase. And that causes a lot of friction in that buying journey where they're getting a product recommendation, which happens on almost all websites now. Probably all the websites that you all have have product recommendations. If they feel like they're irrelevant, that is actually a hindrance to working their way through that shopping journey.

Phillip: [00:15:24] And If I could jump in with one insight there too. One of the qualitative observations of this study is the younger generation has a new expectation that they're in control. I'll give you an example. You go on TikTok, you go on Instagram, or you go on any other algorithmic timeline, and you observe a younger person navigating that timeline. Content they don't like, they scroll right past, they don't give it a second to dwell because they don't want to train the algorithm to see more of it. They'll go in and they'll say, "I don't like this." They'll thumbs it down on YouTube. They'll comment to the negative and say, "Why is this in my feed? I hate this. I never asked for this. Will you stop showing me this video?" And this is an implicit directional outlook for what I'm going to say is like the new Amazon effect. I might have expected 2 day fast free shipping from my ecommerce 20 years ago. Today, I wanna be more in control of being able to tune how those things are being delivered to me. What are the factors that rank that make that a valid recommendation, and how do I have algorithmic control to tweak how it's being presented to me?

Melissa: [00:16:41] Exactly. Yeah. Well, John, I would love to get your perspective. I mean, how does your experience at Attentive either reinforce all this or sort of diverge? What are you seeing?

John: [00:16:52] Dramatically more reinforced than diverged for sure, which is good.

Melissa: [00:16:57] Okay.

John: [00:16:58] I think a few things we've seen specific to this, what I'd call change from channel to modal, is the consumer doesn't care. Right? And so the mediums in which they're communicated to is pretty much irrelevant to them. And knowing that we work with tons of customers that think of channels, what we're educating them to do better on is think of channels separate from strategy. So instead of channels being the strategy, strategy kind of dictating the channel specifically, which has allowed us to provide guidance in a way that's generating more ROI that's engaging the consumer in a better way, avoiding the experiences you're mentioning specific to an experience on like a social media application. Obviously, we live and breathe within the CRM marketing ecosystem, so maybe less TikTok and more like SMS and email. But avoiding those, you know, channel-based decisions and focusing on those model-based decisions, which obviously come a lot down to identity and data. And I won't skip ahead to the conversation around AI just yet. But the behavior of the consumer is also changing dramatically in terms of how they're discovering brands as well. So all of, you know, the UGC and the ratings and reviews, and we recently just put out a blog post on how more consumers are now living and breathing within their ChatGPT, their Gemini to do exactly what you were mentioning specific to discovery prior to even engaging a product or even getting to their website to have these experiences that Future Commerce has obviously put so much brilliant data behind.

Melissa: [00:18:30] Yeah. I think it reminds me I just thought of this of what Sharon Gee, our SVP of Sales and Partnerships at Feedonomics used to say or still says, "It's not so much the channel. Don't over index on the channel. Look at your customer's behavior in the channel." And I think that's really key to this omnimodal concept. Okay. We got to keep going. We could talk forever. Let's go to the second insight. And, Phillip, I know that you did explain this and that was super helpful. But tell us a little bit more about omnimodal within the context of this data. Just give the audience a few key points.

Phillip: [00:19:09] Let's stretch the word out a little bit and say it's more about moods and attitudinal alignment. Am I in the mood to shop right now? I could be persuaded to be in the mood to shop. But I have to be in a certain frame of mind when I'm going to use multiple channels to make a buying decision. How do I reduce that? So if everything in the world around the consumer is giving them more control, not less, so how do I reduce the number, my number of dependencies to make a qualified buying decision? Can I go to one place, one resource? I can't just go to Google anymore, can't just type in a search box. They're going to make me try to opt into Gemini, for crying out loud. There are so many things that are now hurdles where there's bits of information, and now it's on me to have to assemble it. A great example is a recent omnimodal shopping experience that I had. I have a car. Most people have a car. I just bought this car, and now it has a screw in the tire. It turns out the screw in the tire can't be patched or repaired because my tire has Kevlar in it. This is the thing now, and that tire is $600 from the dealer. I said, "Absolutely not. I'm going to find that somewhere else." But every single auto dealer website, every tire wholesaler, every online, Costco auto, you have to put in a step of your make, model, and your sort of trim of your vehicle to get to the quote of how much it's going to be paid installed for one tire delivered to my house. I tested this new modality out, I went to ChatGPT. It was not the 1st place I went, but based on my experience, it may be the first place I go in the future because all of this metadata is exposed to search engines, but the website makes me, the human, jump through a million hoops just to get the information. And this is the kind of buying decision that a human would reduce friction. I could just go and pay a little bit extra by going to the dealer and remove my own friction. Now I can have AI agents do this for me. And this is the kind of thing where Perplexity looked at 15 sites and gave me price quotes. ChatGPT found exactly where the deep link was on the Costco website, let me bypass all of the friction, and get right to the purchase.

Melissa: [00:21:31] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:21:31] And if I'm figuring this out and I'm an old guy, I have to believe that there's a new kind of a consumer who is very very savvy about this. A few things that came out of this study is where people make buying decisions isn't always relegated back to the times they spend most channels in. I think that this is a room where we can get really caught up in that sort of thing. Like, people are on TikTok, so we need to invest in TikTok. And I think that that's an important insight, and I don't want to take anything away from it. But people spend, in our study, they'll spend 7% of their time in the past month, or 7% will have spent time in the past month in our study on a platform like Twitch, which is live streaming for gaming or live streaming parasocial relationships, but 37% say they use that for a buying decision.

Melissa: [00:22:21] Yep.

Phillip: [00:22:22] So looking where these gaps exist for where people spend time, where they're making these purchase decisions, and how they're going to use that in this new mode of shopping is, I think, an overlooked insight for people that make decisions around the future of commerce.

Melissa: [00:22:37] A 100%. Yeah. And, John, I just wanna get your thoughts quickly before we move on to this next insight. But with Attentive being an AI-powered marketing platform, I mean, you're squarely in the middle of all this. So what are some of just those best practices that you're advocating when it comes to really educating your customers, just setting them up for success?

John: [00:23:00] We tend to bifurcate it a little bit in what's kind of like common sense. We call it AI essentials. We believe there's the access and tools that are pretty easily accessible for businesses to take advantage of. Think, you know, ChatGPT for copy creation, subject line matter, things that brands are looking to accomplish and do things basically faster, more efficiently, and not waste a lot of time and energy on that they might have historically. What I'm most excited about is kind of realizing some of the promises of personalization that we've heard about for so long, specific to things like segmentation and identity, and all of the promise of one to one communications. AI actually enables us to do that, which is pretty spectacular. So whether you're an UGG or an H&M or any which one of our customers, you know, historically speaking, your idea of personalization was using consumer behavior to trigger a message, which as we talk about modal-based buying experiences, that's something consumers just know how to do. Right? Do I want 10% off? Great. Add it to cart, wait 20 minutes. Everyone knows how to do it. That's not personalization in our experience or our even lived experience as a shopper. So AI for us is just actually enabling that through the copy, through the timing, and with these large language models and the infusion of AI, which requires a ton of data, which luckily we have. Some of the performance we're seeing is double, triple, you know, multitudes more of what the consumer wants, which obviously for our customers means more dollars in their pocket, which is great, but also ensures that we're generating really high LTV along the way. But UGG's a great example. You know, tTgle behavioral personalized communication messaging strategy. It's not going out at the same time. The copy is unique to a one to one perspective. It's using their brand voice to communicate in a way that's not some copy creator sitting there, like, everyone's just going to get kinda the same stuff. And that's not just been great for our customers, but as a part of this model conversation, I think it's great for consumers. Right? They're sticking around longer. They're obviously purchasing more goods and services from our clientele, but increasing the LTV of that relationship is what we've all been focused on historically. So fun to see AI make it real, which I know we've been talking about things like personalization and one to one for so long, but we're excited to have that actually come to fruition, which is cool.

Melissa: [00:25:29] Yeah. Those are great examples. Okay. Third and final insight revolves around contextual relevance. So one of the things this study clearly demonstrates is the need for contextual relevance and how it's on the rise. And that if you're doing it right, that it can be a catalyst for brand affinity. So, Brian, what does that mean for this audience? Tell us a little bit about that.

Brian: [00:25:55] Yeah. I talked a little bit about how context is collapsing, and it's how it's really hard for people to know where things were at and where the brand loyalty is way down. And so it's really hard for people to get a sense of where they're at and what they've done before. And so there are some great tools that are available right now to help provide some of that context for people. Email, text, recommendations, and things like that. I think one of the things is, like, as people enter the journey, and I mentioned before, bad friction is a lot of the challenge. People don't like to have to repeat themselves. They also don't like to have to orchestrate their whole lives. And Google right now, when you go search for something on Google, it's going to bring up a whole list of stuff that you have to sort through on your own, and people want more control. As Phillip said, they need things to help bring it together. So they actually are, and we saw this on the last set of data, and the younger generation is going to things like Perplexity, almost in an exact inverse proportion to the way that they're leaving Google. And I think it was the amount of usage of Google was down from the previous two generations by almost the exact same percentage that usage of AI was up.

Melissa: [00:27:14] Yes. I love that data point.

Brian: [00:27:15] Yeah. So I think it was between 22 and 29%, was the difference. And so that new generation is leveraging tools like Perplexity, as Phillip mentioned, to help consolidate and bring together all those pieces to help eliminate friction. And so as you think about the tools that you have available to you in your experiences, whether that's AI-powered recommendations, whether that's connecting your history with the client between email and purchase history, even in a B2B context. Being able to bring those things together, and connect the dots between their history and how they're purchasing, what they have purchased, what they might need next, and the channels that you see them most active in in trying to gather that information. Whether that be going in to log in to their account or getting it in via email, that helps them be able to assess what they need to do next and provide those relevant recommendations that are essential, given this collapse of context and people just having their brains everywhere and having data everywhere. They have to have a way to sort through that and make sense of their next shopping step. And I do want to emphasize, we love to get into philosophy and future thinkers from the past at Future Commerce. There's a guy named Norbert Wiener.

Melissa: [00:28:46] Next time... {laughter}

Phillip: [00:28:46] He won't, but go on. We're going to hear it.

Brian: [00:28:50] I know. We gotta go. I know. He wrote a book called The Human Use of Human Beings, and he had a thesis about where people and machines should interact. You need to think about your brand and how to categorize where you decide you want to involve people in the process and where you want to involve machines in the process. And so go check out that book.

Melissa: [00:29:14] I love that. No. That's a great recommendation, a relevant product recommendation. {laughter} Okay. I wanted to jump over to John because I wanted to get your Attentive perspective on this. One of the things that when we were doing this research that I know I found really interesting, I'm sure you did too, Brian and Phillip, but we have this idea of what consumers want and also what they don't want. One of the interesting data points is that 51% of the respondents said that they want less emails that are simply reminding them they have an item in their cart. If there's no discount, they're really not interested. So sometimes that's not feasible. So I ask you, John, how can brands and retailers engage in meaningful ways beyond just discounts? What do you tell your customers?

John: [00:30:06] Great question. Obviously, we have very discount-heavy customers that leverage that as a huge portion of their strategy. I think in terms of strategy and execution within Attentive, a few different ways we've historically gone about that specifically. Some of the AI components I mentioned earlier around personalization have been huge in terms of, obviously, enabling what you guys are talking about from Future Comments where consumers are interested in a more smoother experience. Some of them are interested in discounts. So understanding who those people are and then better segmenting based on who those folks are and obviously aligning to what their goals are and aligning to what we're looking to achieve within the CRM marketing strategy. I do think be careful who you work with in the CRM marketing software space. There has historically been just a huge play for volume. We all know the game of attribution. We all know the game of, like, who gets the dollars based on where messages are sent, how often, etcetera. We find that as consumers are getting smarter and taking advantage of those opportunities, being able to segment those people and being able to look towards LTV as the biggest conversation starter internally as a part of focusing on strategy versus dollar amount, message amount, get to our outcome, no holds bar, without kind of any foresight into the future of what that consumer is going to look like many months years into the future is, again, something we talk about a ton, whether it's in line with some of the AI toolings and products that we have in the space to date, or just understanding what the consumers want with the most amount of information that we have to help them with.

Melissa: [00:31:43] Great advice. Okay. So here we are again with our key insights and takeaways. So to sum it up, expectations are higher, but the more you customize those user flows, the more you'll meet and exceed expectations. The consumer mindset has shifted from omnichannel to omnimodal. Thank you so much, Phillip, for your explanation. And, also, AI can be that gentle nudge, I think, that guides the shopper through the journey. And then lastly, contextual relevance is becoming more and more important to the consumer experience. We didn't get too much into this, but it often requires deals in exchange for data. If you download the report, you will be able to read more about that. So thank you so much, all three of you, Future Commerce and Attentive, for sharing your invaluable insights. This was such a good conversation. I truly wish we had more time, but this has been great. And thank you to our audience for joining us. Hopefully, you can apply the learnings, download the report, and you can find this recording and many other episodes of our Make It Big podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much.