Why Less Is More In Modern Marketing

Omnichannel, as a word, is very much a child of the 21^st century. Like the QR code, it needed a pandemic to provide the exact use case to drive adoption and behavior change. The QR code benefited from an overnight need for handsfree menus, venue check-in, and an easier gateway to shopping. Similarly, omnichannel was given a massive COVID boost as the world swung towards online shopping, contactless delivery, and curbside pickup.

The term “omnichannel” started popping up in Google searches in 2010 and rose steadily in prominence and search results through the pandemic era to this year. In the beginning, it served a purpose – to remind marketers that physical and digital channels need to work together smoothly and continuously. Well, a decade and a half on, we’ve got that memo.

Today, the ability to unify channels is both technologically and organizationally possible. And consumers demand nothing less.

Over the years though, the original meaning of omnichannel became twisted. Cast your mind back: in 2010, the iPhone was a new thing, social was only a few years old, we were talking UGC (user-generated content) and not influencers, and TikTok was something that your Timex did. It was like the dark ages of digital.

With the explosion of channels since, we’ve started to interpret omnichannel as marketers needing to do it all. And let me tell you, that is neither advisable nor possible. Unlike the QR code, which is a relatively simple tactical use of technology, the financial feasibility of “omni” is not doable for most companies. The amount of content already required to stretch across channels is reaching diminishing investment returns.

This notion clicked for me earlier this year at the World Retail Congress, when some of the best retailers on the planet took to the stage and began talking about “OPTIchannel”. The argument presented was that omnichannel is not feasible, because no marketer has the resources to be omni (from the Latin – “every/all”) or omnipresent. Instead, we need to think more about optichannel – optimizing around the channels that make the most sense. That mix can change based upon audience, brief, jobs-to-be-done, brand KPIs, commercial objectives, and so on.

Conceptually, the right channel choice should come from two sources. Start with an outside-in view: who is your consumer, what is their journey to purchase, and what are the right channels (and the right moments for that matter) with which to engage them? Then overlay your consumer insight with an inside-out view: what are your organization’s operational capabilities and ability to respond?

Strategically, optichannel is about sacrifice, trade-offs. You can’t do it all, so what are the best options? And isn’t that the crux of great marketing? As the American academic and strategic guru Michael Porter once said; “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

Beyond the basics, marketers need to use the tech tools available today (which weren’t there in 2010) to help make the right decisions – and optimize on the fly. As I wrote recently in Forbes, it’s critical to connect your commerce tech and martech. Once you can visualize the data from both sources in a single view, you can make better channel choices, and both create demand and manage supply in harmony.

You could also think about optichannel as optimizing messaging per channel. Gen AI and technology more broadly are helping marketers with that challenge as well. One suite of tools that I love allows us to gather deep content analytics on marketplace product detail pages and automatically optimize – updating the messaging depending upon brand and product status, pricing and promotional tactics, and competitive activity.

So, let’s move on from omnichannel and stop fragmenting our budgets and resources. Let’s start making the optichannel choices necessary to meaningfully connect with consumers and convert them to our brands.