An article posted on strategy+business (registration required) recently came to my attention. It was floating around in a pool of articles that revolved around battling showrooming, how shoppers consume social media content, and mobile’s role in the in-store experience. This article stood out because it promised to provide insight into the customer mindset around their social engagement with a brand. It didn’t turn out how I expected it to. In the context of all those other articles out there this week, it became even more interesting.

First, the article makes the point that brands have to engage with consumers by connecting with “the whole person” and not just the part of them that buys. The authors cite a bunch of cognitive research into the drivers that enable consumers to connect emotionally with brands, along with the iterative nature of that process – an interplay between fast and slow thinking. As a very brief recap, fast thinking is when a person takes cognitive shortcuts. In many ways it is the nirvana that retailers and brands seek when it comes to product decisions. Retailers want to be at the end of the cognitive shortcut that answers the question “Where should I go to look for this product?” And brands want to be at the end of the cognitive shortcut that answers the question “Which item within this product selection should I buy?” The concept of “I buy what my friends recommend” is an example of fast thinking.

Slow thinking, on the other hand, is when a person spends some time deliberating. In a shopping context, they research the product, read a bunch of reviews, consider which retailers have the best price, and which brand has the best mix of quality, price, and availability.

If a brand wants to build loyalty, they have to be prepared to cycle back and forth between winning the war on the analysis front and then continuing to deliver against future fast-thinking opportunities. If a brand can navigate a couple of iterations of fast thinking vs. slow thinking on the part of a shopper, then it has the chance of becoming that cognitive shortcut in whatever category it is the brand is trying to own. The more consistent a brand is in delivering on that cognitive shortcut, the less often a consumer feels the need to rely on slow thinking in making a decision that involves the brand.

The difference here is trust. The brand (or retailer) has generated trust, and continues to deliver on trust expectations. The problem with trust is that it is a lot like staying a healthy weight. As the saying goes, a moment on the lips is a lifetime on the hips – the trust equivalent of this is trust broken once takes a lifetime to rebuild.

Now, this s+b article was examining the application of these concepts in a social realm. But showrooming is a very good example of what happens when a retailer or brand hasn’t earned its shoppers’ trust in the store. It makes me wonder a couple of things:

Are retailers doing all they can to engage the “whole shopper” in the store?

My thinking is no. At the Digital Signage Expo in London in May, McDonald’s presented their total store redesign that they are currently testing in Milton-Keynes. I wish I could’ve gotten up there to see it in action, but the main point of what they did was they rethought the whole food purchase process from scratch. Their objective: to make it easier and more fun for families with young children to order and eat at a McDonald’s restaurant. When was the last time a retailer truly took a step back and reimagined their entire store operation? Bloom from Food Lion comes to mind, though sadly that concept didn’t make it longer term.

The problem is, in the store, retailers are hyper-focused on the purchase. The item is here, the shopper with her wallet is here, there should be some kind of purchase happening. But if showrooming has taught us nothing else, it has revealed that there is a pre-purchase imperative that happens in stores as well. And clearly retailers are not doing enough to meet those pre-purchase needs, or consumers wouldn’t turn to their phones in the first place. The s+b article cites four drivers for the choices people make: the drive to acquire possessions and status, the drive to bond and relate with others, the drive to learn and understand the world, and the drive to defend what they consider important. I would argue that the only thing stores are good at today is the drive to acquire possessions. I won’t even give them credit for the second half of that driver – status – as retailers continue to look for ways to identify and acknowledge shoppers as they walk in the door. Out of four stars, the average retail store manages one-half of one star.

Are retailers providing in-store touchpoints that address both fast thinking and slow thinking? 
 

Whether consumer electronics or groceries, retailers have historically relied on brands to do all the work when it comes to slow thinking – investing to achieve that cognitive shortcut status of the fast-thinking reaction to “which item in this product category should I purchase”. Retailers have provided only a base-level investment in trying to be the fast thinking response to “where should I go to find the product I want to purchase” – revolving primarily around “I have all of these brands, so you should come here first.” And if a shopper wanted some slow-thinking help, why, the store employee could provide the content that would help the shopper along that path.

The issue that retailers now face is one of trust. Just like the lifetime on the hips, retailers have not kept up with delivering on their shoppers’ trust expectations in stores. They have broken trust on so many levels it’s scary. They can no longer be trusted to be the place with the best selection, thanks to Amazon on one side and carefully curated sites and stores on the other. They can no longer be trusted to provide the best price in stores, as their own two-tiered online and in-store pricing models have exposed. And they can no longer be trusted to provide solid in-store expertise, as years of grinding turnover and cuts to labor spend in stores, alongside poor training, glaring examples of employees spreading misinformation about products or just being straight-up uninformed, have proven.

While retailers are scrambling to rebuild that trust, a couple of iPads thrown at their employees isn’t going to fix the problem – and it certainly won’t get fixed overnight. Retailers have to go back to that iterative movement between slow thinking and fast thinking, and then consistently deliver on fast thinking expectations, before they can ever hope to get a level of trust with shoppers that eliminates the need for showrooming. So the question that retailers need to be thinking about isn’t so much about getting tech into store employee’s hands as it is about providing, as part of the in-store experience, the content and service that help deliberative, slow-thinking consumers shop. That’s not just having smarter employees. Or a smarter store manager.

And it’s no silver bullet.