High Street Chains Fight Back!

The biggest thing that is going to happen this year is the High Street Chains Fight Back!  M&S, John Lewis, Debehams, Tesco – these guys are in no mood for messing.

We’ve had 10 years of massive website growth, a zillion small players (like PAN) taking market share from the big boys… High Streets have been closing down Woolies, HMV, Blockbusters they couldn’t take the pace.

Two further factors, Social Media and Mobiles have made selling online just that much HARDER… no joking if you want to break into any market today it’s a heck of a lot harder than 10 years ago, there are so many considerations to take into account.

This is where money comes in… and the High Street Chains have LOADS OF IT… if John Lewis want to cempete with you half decently they will screw you.

So my take away is that High Street Chains have had enough, recessions over, we’ve trodden on their toes long enough and they are angry… Google will get into bed with them.

I would also add this does not only effect eCommerce sites, but it effects lawyers, services, designers and all businesses equally.

Solution

Unfortunately we all need to partner up with a bigger outfits, all of us, from eCommerce shopping sites through to small artists.  This is an effect of the way consumers will be using our websites in the future, the trend to use fewer websites will increase while the ability to research websites (using Google) will decrease.

Scale is the ultimate solution – as someone told me over Christmas, we all have to have an X-factor approach to marketing if we want to be successful.