#eCommerce Fails Without Great #Operations

Building a great brand is necessary for eCommerce, but the mechanics of "building your brand" are really about two things:

1 - CONSISTENTLY and CLEARLY communicating about your values, differentiators, and products across all channels that your potential customers interact with.

2 - RELENTLESSLY serving customers in all touchpoints to ensure they have a great experience and want to rave about their experience to others.

Everything in retail serves these goals. But everything about these goals involves operational excellence. Here's what I mean:

- The ability to consistently come up with themes and ideas that resonate with your customer base. This requires creativity, focus, coordination, and scheduling.

- The ability to analyze shopper's competitive options to understand what makes them different, to ensure you have clear messaging. Regular review is necessary to ensure you are not missing what the customer is experiencing every day in the market.

- The ability to generate great copy that crisply describes what you are about. Content is a pipeline.

- The ability to generate high volumes of quality imagery and other visual-related content that so defines how people consume the world around them today. You could have great imagery, but if it's too high cost and you can't produce it enough, your competition will win because they overwhelm the better operational brand with HIGH VOLUMES of great content, not just great content.

- Oh, and all those other processes people normally call operations are of course also operations! Logistics, Supply Chain, Customer Service, Forecasting, S&OP, FP&A.

I could keep going across every capability needed to serve customers well.

Regardless of what department these functions are in, these all require coordination, scheduling, focus, and continuous improvement. The combination of people, process, technology and data working together.

In other words, operations.

Great operational processes without vision, can sometimes recover because you are learning fast enough to figure out the vision. Great vision without great operational execution is like a tree falling in the woods.

If your customer is close by, they might see it but are probably running the other way. Or they might not see it at all because you missed the mark.