Millennials are people born between 1980-2000 and seen as target group who is open to spend money on the good things in life, following new behaviors but with higher expectations in customer experience.

Has your shopping behavior changed in the last year? I like to share two of my recent examples which showed me that experience is changing and why establishes brands have to stay agile to not lose their customers. I have observed three success factors for success in sales with millennials.

#1 Fast & furious instagram marketing

A video paints a 1000 words. The old term needs to be rewritten. A simple video focused on style and the value has made me take a deeper look recently and buy new things. It can be that simple.

#2 New focused & innovative brands

My last two online orders are from brands I did not know before. Both reached me with Instagram advertising. L‘Estrange London promised a chino „I never want to take off“. 125 GBP is a fairly high price for an unknown brand and quality – but I can confirm I truly like wearing it. I even added a second one and now have navy and khaki. Both go well will white sneakers by the way.

The other one are running / sports shorts for only 17€ from Tee Shop, which is able to carry my iPhone in a smart way. The style reminds me of Nike, but I did not find a comparable product at Nike, which is my default and preferred sportswear. So far….

My learning is, switching from one brand to the other is an easy thing for me but a major risk for every brand.

#3 Be Aggressive

While sitting on an airplane I received the request accepting photos and videos of “Fabians iPhone 12“. Because of curiosity I accepted one and received a price list of Champaign from a bar in Mykonos.

Either the person was drunk or this is a new level of aggressive direct marketing with unknown target group, but focused on a group who is traveling to a concrete location. Is this smart or not acceptable? What is your view?

What can we learn from this?

Don’t sleep!

Try new things.

Do things differently.

Marketers are now living the dream of better conversions in e-commerce and less efforts in creating compelling content marketing with use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. But without great master data this stays an illusion.

I had the pleasure to be interviewed by an innovator in this space (AX Semantics) on this matters. Please read the full interview in German or English here.

Instagram launched a brand new ecommerce checkout feature for more than 20 top brands – including Kylie Cosmetics, Nike, Uniqlo and Warbly Parker. The checkout button on Twitter was not a success story, but Instagram has true potential. Why?

From my own experience I follow brands to get inspiration about shoes, watches or Ota he fashion styles. I also started to buy things based on instagram advertising, but I found it hard to connect from a nice fashion image to the web shop for ordering it. The new feature will allow me to make an order without learning the app. Smart.

What does this mean for merchandisers, digital marketers or e-commerce managers and their PIM / MDM?

Publishing an engaging image will now elevate from a branding to a conversation factor and measure-able revenue driver. A question to answer is: how much information will a customer need inside the Instagram app to take a purchasing decision? Am insta-style image, size, price will be basic requirements. What about other details like a size guide, fabric information?

The value of Product Information Management (PIM) for Omnichannel customer experience was always providing the flexibility to brands and retailers managing their full assortment and reacting to new sales and marketing channels needs with channel specific outputs. Companies now have to align what images and fields are needed to export to the FB/ Instagram business manager and the product catalog. As on FB, I expect Instagram will communicate an API for this as well.

Instagram just requires you to

• Have the Businessmanager and a product catalog.
• only offer physical products
• habe an instagram business account

Here is the guide provided by Instagram: https://www.facebook.com/business/instagram/shopping

What is next?

The next phase after selling is obviously connecting the dots even better: Which customer has shown what interest, what products have this customer purchased, what is the next logical offer to this customer. This requires companies to elevate their PIM platform to a full master data management (MDM) use by connecting products, bundles, customers and more to take customer experience to the next level.