Meaningful and Meaningless Friction
by Kate Nightingale, Consumer Psychologist @ Humanising Brands
Intro: Psychologist’s Look at Retail Technology
This is a series of 4 articles, in conversation with OLR where we will explore the behavioural/psychological underpinnings of various retail technologies and how these can be extremely valuable to your brand. These will be done in the form of four customer episodes. Why? Because when we can truly personally relate to the information presented - information lands better in our brains and is more readily available for use. Yes, that’s right! We are using a simple behavioural technique on you, to help you process the presented information more easily.
The Impact of Technology on Meaningful and Meaningless Friction
As much as technology is an integral part of any retail experience now, it has been undergoing profound shifts over the last few years. From simply offering additional information or delivering convenience to customers to augmenting brand experience both online and offline. More recently the shift has been towards ‘invisible to customer’ technology, working at the back of the house to ease a customer’s journey.
Yet, it is the impact of the pandemic that truly accelerated technological change. McKinsey’s report in 2020 suggested that the adoption sped up by several years. We have certainly seen customers learning to use online ordering, companies developing e-commerce sites urgently and brands with existing online presence tremendously improving their experience.
“Although many new technologies that customers adopted were integrated into their shopping journey due to necessity, some managed to sneak through the mind cracks and habituate themselves for good. Why?”
Meaningful and meaningless friction
No such thing as frictionless experience exists nor should it be a goal for any brand. Frictionless means devoid of meaning, impact, engagement, a non-event of such. You obviously want your brand experience to be engaging, memorable & meaningful. Thus, reducing meaningless friction and increasing meaningful friction is your best bet.
Meaningless friction is about those elements of the customer experience that don’t add value for the customer, or even worse - they take up valuable time, and more often than not, have a detrimental effect on the overall shopping experience and brand perception. Simply put, all the aspects that tend to annoy us. A lot of the technologies we will mention in this set of articles are precisely designed to reduce the instances of meaningless friction.
Meaningful friction however relates to solutions that enhance engagement, require commitment from the customer and add tremendous value to your overall customer experience and brand perception. It can be anything from having a chance to vote on what product colour should be introduced in the next season, to the ‘buy online and pick up in store’ delivery option.
And now that in-store shopping is back, that same positive attitude to technology can help with the adoption of in-store technology and even create a considerably more positive brand perception due to its integration than pre-pandemic. However, ensuring that the technology you introduce adds value to your customer's experience will be crucial to your success. Let’s see what that could look like throughout the customer journey.
If you have more questions about consumer psychology or the technology integration behind it, get in touch with KATE NIGHTINGALE or OLR respectively.
References:
McKinsey & Company. (2020). How Covid-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point - and transformed business forever. Retrieved from: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever