The global spread of COVID-19 has hit traditional retailers hard in 2020, with many of the UK’s high streets and town centres transformed into almost-no-go zones over the spring and summer lockdown period. Conventional product-based consumer and lifestyle PR has been almost decimated in many sectors, particularly at the luxury and aspirational end of the market, as the pandemic saw millions of workers furloughed and more households tighten their belts in response to the uncertainty.
However, while the future for the British high street looks bleak as the pandemic continues to loom large over traditional bricks-and-mortar retail, online and omnichannel retailers are adopting new retail technologies faster than ever before.
E-commerce is driving development in new retail tech
Innovation in customer experience (CX), business resilience and continuity, scalability and future-proofing, and constantly improving delivery logistics in a ‘shopping-by-proxy’ world: these are the key trends that are driving developments in new retail technologies.
The boost in online and mobile retail caused by COVID-19 is unsurprising, yet the actual scale of the impact on the retail industry is clear from the latest market stats coming out of the Centre for Retail Research (CRR), which confirms that e-commerce is by far the fastest growing segment of the retail market in Europe and North America. Combined e-commerce sales in Western Europe, for example, were £152.3 billion in 2015, £224.43 billion in 2019 and, taking into account the boost given by the lockdown of non-essential stores earlier this year, are predicted to equal £294.19 billion by the end 2020.
In layperson’s terms, this means that e-commerce sales have nearly doubled in Western Europe in the last five years alone.
“What the coronavirus pandemic has done is to bring forward the higher levels of online sales that we expected in 2021 (or 2025 in some cases) to 2020, but we expect online sales to dip in 2021 to a combined figure of £281.131bn (down -4.4%),” reported the CRR in July 2020. “Sales should rise in 2022 as economic growth produces more consumer spending and the normally higher growth rate of e-commerce will drive greater revenues.”
Communicating retail tech innovation effectively
So what does all of this mean for retail technology PR? The overall market trend over the next five to ten years foresees an almost constant growth in online retail and e-commerce. And that’s even allowing for a slight dip in e-commerce growth in 2021 (providing, god forbid, that our high streets and bricks-and-mortar retailers don’t face another year of the pandemic!).
Most importantly, the impact that COVID-19 has had on customer expectations cannot be understated. Retailers are more focused than ever on developing new ways of using consumer data to better understand their customers’ needs, in order to deliver the best customer experience (CX) possible, from the point of purchase and all the way through to the moment of delivery.
Truly effective retail technology PR has to understand both the macro-level market changes (such as those outlined above) impacting on a client’s particular retail tech offering – whether it be an e-commerce platform, a new CX or payments innovation, a new development in logistics and delivery or any other retail tech innovation – as well as understanding clear, concise and compelling ways in which to communicate in clear, jargon-free language the business benefits of any new retail tech.
The fact is this: Online and digital technologies have and will fundamentally continue to change the ways in which we shop over the coming decade. And the pandemic has only served to accelerate this process. Competition in retail tech is fierce – from global omnichannel retail data or third party logistics providers through to supply chain management specialists and innovators in the customer experience (CX) sphere – which means that success is more dependent than ever before upon a brand’s reputation amongst industry peers, competitors, customers and consumers alike.
Communicating the consumer and business benefits of retail technologies in clear, concise and in compelling ways is no small task, as the world of tech (and retail tech, in particular) thrives on jargon and acronyms, many of which may well be meaningless to a retailer’s customer, supplier or buyer. Retail tech innovations may well be driven by the latest technological innovations in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), machine learning (ML) and more. Crafting narratives about how these innovations change, impact and improve a customer’s life or a supplier’s business in acronym-free English is perhaps one of the biggest challenges ahead for retail tech PRs.
Healthcare and the latest developments in health technology have never been higher on the public agenda, following the last seven months of COVID-19 related lockdowns, curfews and regular high-profile TV briefings on public health from senior officials and scientists. Pretty much anybody you speak to will have an opinion on the many, often conflicting, healthcare and health technology issues surrounding the coronavirus pandemic. Which means that effective communication about healthcare and new developments in health technologies is more vital than ever before.
From contact-tracing to mental health and wellbeing mobile apps, through to the latest developments in tele-medicine, e-health and new wearable health technologies for monitoring or preventative purposes, technology is transforming and improving healthcare.
The focus on digital transformation across the NHS and private healthcare provision, and the rapid pace of innovation in healthcare technologies incorporating artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, fitness wearables, wellness apps, biometrics, remote diagnostics and more means that demand for reliable, trustworthy and engaging news and content on health tech is high.
Cutting through the health tech noise
It is no longer good enough to tell your potential clients that you are ‘passionate’ about health tech, because – as the cliché goes – in these ‘unprecedented times’ (when we all have our own personal favourite virologists!) almost everybody is passionate and holds strong opinions about healthcare provision and new advances in health tech. This means that PRs in the sector need to have a deep understanding of the market and the media opportunities for health tech entrepreneurs, brands, organisations and institutions to genuinely ‘cut through’ the noise, and to win clients the coverage, thought leadership and business opportunities that their products, services and innovations deserve.
As the number of specialist health tech media outlets, comms channels and stakeholders for health tech proliferate, clients and PR agencies alike need to have a laser-sharp focus on what their objectives are when developing their PR and comms strategies. And they need to develop content that delivers. Content that is not only creative, engaging and informative, but content that is also grounded in science, approved by legitimate healthcare experts and backed up by effective facts, figures and appropriate market research.
PRs need to be more aware than ever that, whoever they are targeting with their client’s health tech content and messaging, be it potential investors, market analysts, healthcare journalists, editors and others, those people are even more likely to be suffering from ‘health tech messaging fatigue’.
In any sector where innovation is this fierce (and, let’s be clear, bogus news and scientific claims are rife) comms need to work harder than ever to not only grab an audience’s attention, but also to maintain that engagement and to make highly complex arguments to explain the value of new health tech innovations quickly and succinctly.
Liberal use of tech buzzwords no longer cut it. It’s no longer feasible to simply state that your client’s product or service is “AI-powered” or “deploys cutting-edge robotics”, without backing this up with factually-correct and scientifically-proven correct content that creatively and engagingly explains how and why and what the real-world value is in doing these things.
Otherwise, the audiences you need to communicate with are just going to see through this style of approach for what it is. And you’ve lost them at the first health tech PR hurdle.
(This post first appeared on the PRCA blog).