We just can’t help it. We humans are experience driven. Fresh encounters captivate us. Bright, shiny objects lure us like catnip. No wonder “new” remains the most compelling word in marketing, promising something novel. Experiential marketing is not a new idea. Shopping malls and supermarkets have been ramping up their retail razzmatazz and consumer engagement for decades.

Thanks to e-commerce, the need to master consumer experiences is evolving rapidly and is more relevant than ever. After all, e-commerce now delivers millions of online interactions daily. Which has made consumers even more discerning — demanding more immersive, intuitive interfaces, while expecting seamless buying experiences across all channels. How do we delight this new generation of e-commerce customers in the ultra-competitive omnichannel marketplace? Well, you could get to know them a little better and learn their pain points by doing a little design thinking before you start creating the product to sell online, or you could design the user experience for your e-commerce store or retail buying experience for your physical store.

Design Thinking: Getting To Know You, Then Solving Problems You Didn’t Know You Had

If we want to please our customers, we need to anticipate their needs. That means being the crossing guard at the intersection of technology and humanity with design thinking. This approach to e-commerce gets extremely human before it becomes digital. The goal is to understand consumer behavior at the deepest levels, to develop empathy with the person we’re hoping to serve.

Although the phrase design thinking has come into vogue, the concept of developing products and services based on understanding your consumer has been around for as long as people have bought stuff. Now we have more data, a daily firehose of analytics from search and shopping behaviors, which gets processed through artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand and predict the customer’s buying choices. The results are being turned into personalized buying experiences using technologies such as natural language searches and augmented, virtual and mixed reality. This is the way to engage a generation that demands control — and not just any old utilitarian experience but an experience that is more immersive, dynamic and engaging by default. Once the sellers (retail or online) are able to provide this personal experience, the whole buying experience becomes enjoyable and memorable, increasing loyalty and virality. That makes buyers into fans, influencers and repeat customers. This is the underpinning of success in commerce, online or offline, whether it’s business to business, business to consumer or consumer to consumer.

To bring all this together and turn it into e-commerce interactions that consumers embrace organically, we need help from the six steps of design thinking.

Empathize

Get to know your customer. Do your research and understand their motivations and behaviors. Get inside their skins without judgment. Discern and consider, but don’t judge.