Facebook’s Franchet stresses compression, relevance at NRF
New York – Nicolas Franchet, head of e-commerce global vertical marketing at Facebook, said that compression of screen sizes as consumers switch to mobile devices is the biggest upcoming challenge retailers will face during a session titled “Data the Matters: The Future of Personalization” at the NRF 2014 Conference & Exposition on Sunday, Jan. 12.
“For the last 10 years, merchandisers could show a couple hundred products at a time online,” said Franchet. “With mobile, you can only show a few products at a time. A higher level of personalization gets it right.”
Franchet said that most retailers underestimate the impact compression will have and that 80% of Facebook’s traffic is now mobile. He also said that retailers can only display about 10% of the products online as they can in a store, and there will be another display reduction by a magnitude of 10 as mobile screens takeover.
“We vastly changed our business in a short period of time,” stated Franchet. “Retail is next.”
Other key trends Franchet discussed include discovery, or ensuring the right people discover your product at the right time, as well as seasonality. One recent example of seasonality is Wendy’s using the polar vortex that submerged much of the U.S. into Arctic temperatures earlier this month as a marketing hook to introduce a new spicy sandwich, according to Franchet.
Other topics Franchet touched upon include the importance of relevance to retail marketing efforts.
“Most messages to the marketplace, such as TV, are irrelevant,” he said. “Ninety percent of retail messages are irrelevant. It’s the bulk of the problem.”
[Editor’s Note: From May 7-9, Chain Store Age will hold the Customer Disruption conference at the Sofitel Hotel in San Francisco Bay, Calif. Join us at this immersive event where the best and brightest, including keynote speaker Nicolas Franchet, will share the latest ideas, practices, technology and solutions enabling retailers to break through the noise and win the engagement revolution. For more information, go to Customerdisruption.com.]