THE NEW WAVE

If you put your ear to the ground, increasingly, you will get a sense that The Times, They are A-Changin’.

To better understand this, we must look at recent history. It is widely known that eCommerce, as an industry, received a great boost from the pandemic. In hindsight, it all looked a bit like wartime economy: with “all” other shops closed, brands and retailers alike doubled down on eCommerce, seen as the sole saviour of a company’s revenues.

Add to that the fact that, while most A-list companies already had eCommerce websites in place, quite often the C-suite wasn’t very familiar with that side of the business. Some money went into it (sometimes profitably so) but the hearts, the minds and the expertise were elsewhere. This meant that, when the emergency kicked-in, there wasn’t much understanding about what worked vs. what didn’t. There was little experience in terms of “how much things should cost” which, coupled with a sellers’ market, allowed vendors to charge sky-high prices for bloated solutions clients barely needed.

We don’t call it a bubble because eCommerce is obviously here to stay but… price-wise and complexity-wise, it had all the elements of a bubble (let’s not even start the conversation on performance marketing and lower-funnel parlour tricks).

The emergency mentality also led to building things quickly, following leads and examples already in the popular vernacular, with no time for subtlety or for considering anything more than mere functionality.

Ecommerce, for 95% of brands anyway, kind of works as a sales channel but it’s sorely lacking in terms of efficiency and it’s almost invariably lacking in terms of communication potential, visual merchandising, etc. (on that front, physical retail is far more advanced).

What about Brand Strategy, the other half of our remit? We can look at the Fashion industry to get a sense of what happened (but most industries are in the same predicament). It grew, grew and grew (this story starts earlier than the eCommerce one but let’s not worry about the different timelines: what matters is where we stand now). Which is a good thing, obviously! The growth required an influx of new managers, often picked from other sectors, turning what was once an insular, cottage-like industry into “Big Business”. Again, a good thing but having all those managers, from more risk-averse and less idiosyncratic places around, made Fashion brands less…special?

What we have today is best practices. It’s managers copying what works (we could talk about merchandising overwriting creative direction but let’s stick to the non-product discourse) but

How many branded “edicolas” can we have before we understand that the idea is worn out? How many iterations of the Jacquemus’ FOOH can we have before fake out-of-home feels just that, “fake”, instead of novel and surprising? How many K-pop idols can we mine before we understand that culture is moving forward? And with budgets contracting, the money cannon can no longer cover up the lack of original thinking.

The ”New Wave” starts from this very understanding:

The New Wave starts because we are at an inflection point. That is, the issue can no longer be ignored and plenty of forward-thinking managers and commentators alike are starting to collectively cry for a solution. The old methods no longer work (customers no longer paying attention, CACs and traditional forms of lower-funnel pumping no longer being sustainable, SEO becoming something users actively bypass, etc.) and new ones are needed. The old “investment levels” are untenable, which is no doubt accelerating the process. You could almost call it a movement. On the eCommerce front, you have the guys at Future Commerce, releasing a content series called “Tabula Rasa”, which is their own way of depicting this watershed moment. On the brand side, a similar discourse is brewing.

The New Wave is what comes after. It’s a new era for eCommerce and brand direction both. While we have our own recipe, we take pleasure in knowing that we are not alone in thinking that a new era is needed, in the first place. That we belong to a “wave”, instead of being lone radicals. That, perhaps, there is some merit to what we think.