Modern marketing world a ‘dog’s breakfast’, says eBay as brands urged to put focus online
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ustralian retailers have been told to step up their game and start delivering a more integrated online-offline experience as the complexities of the modern marketing world were described as a “dog’s breakfast” by eBay’s Enterprises Asia Pacific sales and marketing chief.
Darren Fifield told an audience of marketers in Sydney that brands who master the omni-channel environment will continue to grow while those who don’t will stagnate.
Consumers are becoming ever more demanding, he said, as he suggested companies must finds way of delivering products bought online far quicker than they currently manage.
“The game has changed in North America and Europe to the point where brands and merchants have implemented strategies that are not existing in Australia,” Fifield said.
“If you order something online in Australia it can still take six or eight days to get that product. Yet there are examples in North America where it takes an hour from order confirmation on the website to when you get that product. The world is going to change.”
Speaking at the CMO Disrupt conference, Fifield said marketers “used to have it easy”.
“Everyone was stuck in their swim lanes, the consumer was easily marketable to and they were predictable,” he said. “To quote a phrase it is now a dog’s breakfast and it’s complicated.”
He said marketers historically adopted a “build it and they will come” approach to websites which worked in a world “where the pie got bigger and bigger”.
“But the pies are not getting as big as they once were. Growth is slowing and customers have the ultimate power and the game has changed,” Fifield said.
“Online and offline must be similar to the consumer. You can’t have a different range of product, you can’t have a different price point, consumers want to buy online and return in-store. These types of things are simple but we don’t do them.”
He said stores in North America have become distribution centres which enables the rapid delivery of product. In Australia however, there remains tension between e-commerce and retail.
“The problem is that most brands and manufacturers have an e-commerce department and a retail department and they don’t particularly like one another,” he said. “It’s the old concept of sales and marketing. Organisations who have embraced this scenario have e-commerce and retail as one and don’t have the friction.
“Your consumer is everywhere and they are changing the way they shop and they are subsequently changing the way you need to market to them.”
Earlier in his presentation, Fifield said consumer smartphone experiences with brands was still not up to scratch. He said an “awful lot of money” is spent on data acquisition which is then wasted by poorly communicated messaging which consumers “delete and unsubscribe”.
Turning to the changing behaviour of consumers, Fifield said: “Let’s face it, if the consumer had the opportunity to sit down and order everything online they would and that is the challenge that you have.
“Retailers have to embrace this concept on omni channel. Consumers expect that integration between online and offline to be realistic, timely and seamless.”
In the US, online shoppers have “12 to 15” choices of product delivery whereas in Australia there are “very few”, the eBay executive noted.
He added that requirements of companies to return goods through the post no longer worked with consumers finding the task just “too difficult”.
“That product will probably end up in the next garage sale or car boot sales because it’s just too difficult. The experience with that brand is negative and you won’t see them again.”
“Everything you do is about the extraction of dollars from the consumer. If you don’t do that you don’t get your bonus.”
Steve Jones
Mr Fifield would do well to put his own house in order before taking on the rest of the world. While ebay is, in theory, an excellent sales channel, it is also a ‘dogs breakfast’ of styles and old fashioned design. Also, ebay sellers can not rely on a predictable traffic or sales flow and nobody in the organisation seems to be able to give a coherent explanation of why this is.
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Can someone please remind Darren Fifield that Australia has a population of 23 million, versus the USA with 318 million, and Europe with 742 million with all three having pretty the same land mass.
It’s a pretty easy to figure out why we have less distribution channels.
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Good piece. It’s unacceptable in this day and age for any order to take 5-10 business days to be delivered in a metro area. Points about land mass and population are just excuses for what is actually just business laziness and apathy.
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