part 1       part 2 part 3      part 4    part 5

INSTAMIR

According to Insense, in 2017, the Instagram audience in Russia amounted to 14.4 million people (9.6% of the population). According to the network itself, 22 million per month. In turn, every second young Russian (45%) aged 18-24 years, according to Fashion Consulting Group, has already made purchases on the Internet. At the same time, among older people (45+), less than 18% tried to buy virtually, and among people over 55 years of age, there are even fewer active buyers - only 6% ventured into online shopping. The activity of using the Internet for shopping is still actually inversely proportional to the age of buyers.

Against this background, traditional retail in many countries is already losing ground to modern sales channels, CBRE says. So, Amazon continues to improve the service for customers, offering in 2017 the Amazon Prime Wardrobe service with the ability to quickly deliver, try on and return clothes within 7 days at no additional cost. Levi’s introduced the Levi’s Virtual Stylist bot last year, which helps the company make sure that the buyer has found the right product. Back in 2014, the luxury brand Burberry became the first company to sign an agreement with Twitter to use the "Buy now" instant shopping feature.

Online sales will continue to grow: according to Nielsen, at the beginning of 2018, the growth rate of online sales was 22% versus 4% in traditional retail. "Instagram has long had the opportunity to purchase using trade tags, which is practically not used by fashion brands in Russia," continues Konstantin Budagyan. Instagram recently added the ability to use trade tags in Instagram stories. By the end of this year, we can expect an increase in the popularity of this service among the brands represented in this social network.

Denis Kosachenko also calls "insta-explosions" of sales a logical development of the market. "Now instablogers convert more people than storefronts," muses Mr. Kosachenko. Social networks are a community of people with interests that can and should be influenced. Buyers are spending more and more time online, which means that the promotion channels should shift there. At the same time, traditional channels are still strong in the regions, and online promotion should also visually support stores in the form of storefronts and instore activities. Buyers now have an advantage over retailers: they have information and the opportunity to choose, including where to buy the product. Companies with a conservative approach to service and promotion are losing their positions. In general, retail now cannot be only offline or online, a symbiosis of these channels is necessary. This applies not only to stores and online platforms, but also to various marketplaces and platforms. The ability to choose, the ability to compare prices and purchase in a convenient place for you are the advantages that the buyer has received in our time. For fashionable people, this is an opportunity to quickly find a unique product, for those who save money, an opportunity to find the best price offer.

Konstantin Budagyan supports: buyers are more than ever actively following the changes in the formats of trade by retailers. "Cross-border clothing sales account for a relatively small share of the fashion segment, so trends are set by Russian retailers and developers of social network functionality," the expert explains. Luxury brands, on the other hand, require more attention to the organization of the trading environment and sell better in shopping malls, while brands aimed at young people of the millennials generation are in demand on the Internet.

And although online tools cannot yet prevail over direct B2B communication, they definitely win when it comes to involving the end customer, that is, a person who, for example, will buy Nike sneakers in a Nike outlet store, Konstantin Anisimov is convinced. "Having opened your favorite news site in the morning, the buyer will see a video, opening the search engine will see a text ad in the first lines of the search, and opening your favorite social network will see both a video and a post dedicated to these sneakers. The abundance of visual information from the brand will push a person to come to an outlet store or order sneakers online. Naturally, such communication opportunities are not provided by traditional media: magazines, radio, etc. If we take Russia, then more than half of Russians use the mobile Internet, and the share of online commerce is growing by 5% every year, so promotion in digital is the most important communication tool for retail brands.

To be continued.

Text:Ekaterina Reutskaya

Photo: shutterstock