A strategy for “voice”
According to ComScore (a respected name), close to 50% of search actions will be done through voice by 2020. I am still in the other 50%, having not done a single voice-enabled search till now. But I might “convert” soon. It is a known fact that Amazon’s Echo has taken a march over Google Home in the exciting home assistants category. Amazon’s plan for Echo (and the underlying Alexa) is very ambitious. The following article in Wired will tell you exactly why. In short, Amazon’s ambition to become one of the world’s biggest company is going to be achieved by “liberating” us and making us “free”.
This liberation and freedom will come by empowering our “voice”. Think of all the magical fairy tales you have read. All the wonderful and enchanting things that happen are done by voice. When we are in the dark, we use our voice to ask for directions. We use our voice to make ourselves heard. We also use our voice to display the myriad set of emotions we are capable of experiencing. Before the advent of e-commerce, buying decisions were through voice (in the real world). We haggled, debated, questioned, criticised, praised and ultimately bought via voice. Go to any farmer’s market or a wholesale market, and they run on the power of voice. Think about your local fruit seller and remember the power of his voice (2 for the price of 1 now, everything must go today). Think about the stock exchange floor (the ultimate pedestal of speculative buying and selling), and it is all about the voice.
Amazon wants to give us our voices back, but without the tension, stress, anxiety and strain. It wants to give it back to us the way we have read and imagined it from fairy tales. It wants us to have our voices back as a source of freedom and command via Alexa (and its subservience to our voices).
Subservience is a wrong word in the world of Amazon. The same is very true for Alexa. In this article, research firm L2 outlines its findings on how Alexa orders brands when instructed to buy household items and how it recommends brands after hearing our voices:
The Amazon ecosystem is centred around Prime, which is the hook for bringing us into the Amazon world and keeping us there. As identified by L2, brands that come up as top ranked items under different categories and are Prime eligible, are more likely to be recommended by Alexa (when the voice command for a grocery refill is completely brand agnostic). Higher a brand is on Amazon ratings, higher the levels of perceived quality and higher the ratings on Prime, more likely is it going to be recommended. Smaller brands or ones that are niche will always be at a disadvantage because they don’t have the visibility and the popularity to enjoy top ranking on Amazon. Due to the low demand, in all likelihood they will not be eligible for Prime.
It is important to keep in mind the fact that Alexa can order from outside the Amazon ecosystem, which is through collaborations with other retailers. In the UK, Alexa can order a pizza from Domino’s as an example. Consequently, a strategy for “voice” needs to take into consideration two critical aspects — the size of your brand and its relative popularity in the Amazon Prime world.
Brand equity gets translated into higher ranks, more positive user reviews and quicker Prime eligibility in the Amazon world. This is why building a strong brand continues to be important in a voice-enabled shopping world. Brands cannot build equity specifically for Alexa, but they can use their built up equity as ‘influencer currency’ in Alexa’s AI-driven system (AVS).
But what if your brand is small or niche or is one of the first products of a startup? In these instances, your strategy for “voice” should be focused on building awareness, quality perceptions and recommendations. To be successful in “voice”, your strategy should focus on the physical world and the Amazon world (and in the future that world will also have Google and Apple). Your “voice” strategy starts way before Alexa would even consider you as a brand to be recommended (for a brand agnostic order). It starts by either building a stellar sales reputation within Amazon (non-voice) or by collaborating with Amazon (wherein your brand will become a part of Alexa’s skill set and it can open your brand’s app and order directly from there). Building your sales reputation within Amazon takes longer but is more rewarding — your brand becomes a part of the Amazon shopping universe.
Just like any other strategy, success in voice strategy requires a deep understanding of “where to play” and then going about making sure that it happens to the highest possible degree. In the world of voice-driven retail, brands need to ensure some key things are in place before they can start seeing semblance of success:
- Voice strategy is a collaborative strategy — The benefit appears shared but is ultimately skewed towards the owner of the AI-driven voice interface. To succeed in voice, brands need to be open to partnerships
- Voice strategy should focus on strength of positioning — For a user to specifically order your brand via the Echo means that your brand has memorability and strong positioning. Brands need to remember that voice-enabled purchase decisions are top of the funnel decisions wherein consideration sets are smaller. A voice command is an outcome of a decision taken in the brain. When we are evaluating choices in our brain (in the absence of any visual, audio or smell inputs), we evaluate between a smaller number of choices (and all of them are strong ones)
- Voice strategy is a masterbrand strategy — To be successful with voice, brands need to simplify their portfolios. Even when we are engaging our hands and eyes to take decisions, we find fragmentation and product proliferation debilitating. In a voice-enabled retail environment, the voice strategy should focus on building Amazon presence for a masterbrand, with a focused listing page or dedicated online shop. If your brand, by its nature, has to have variants, then they should be prominent enough for Alexa to ask a follow-up question (which kind of Head & Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo? With or without conditioner?). Too much fragmentation in your portfolio will result in a list of product listings in Amazon with no cohesion
- Voice strategy is an interlinked strategy — Just like corporate strategy is all-encompassing, a voice strategy should not operate in a void. Even if ComScore’s prediction comes true, consumers will continue to buy online through non-voice web interface modes. Developing a strong online presence (both within or outside Amazon) should catapult your brand to “voice-driven” success (and not vice versa). A brand with a strong, consistent and appealing online presence will enjoy a high share of online sales. Over a period of time, a significant proportion of these online sales will become voice-driven, as consumers develop more familiarity with the brand
- Voice strategy is a loyalty-building strategy — In the world of Alexa, loyalty has a different meaning. For Alexa, loyalty is defined by a brand’s consistently high rankings and ratings on Prime. Alexa considers a strong Prime profile as loyalty and will continuously recommend such a brand (when the order is brand agnostic). In short, Alexa is working as a consumer’s shopping assistant, and influencing his or her brand loyalty. If a consumer specifically asks for a brand, then the power of building loyalty shifts to the brand (but Alexa will still look for the Prime currency). If your brand wants to join the thousands of brand owners who have collaborated with Amazon to integrate their brands into Alexa’s skill sets, then your playing ground is fairer, but as always ‘crowded’
- Voice strategy is a memory-building strategy — A common misconception among those who are thinking of including “voice” in their marketing plans is that it has got nothing to do with advertising (leave alone great advertising). On the contrary, the opposite is true. If your brand wants to breakthrough the shackles of Alexa’s Prime-driven preferences, an Echo user should be saying the specific brand name in the voice request. To reach that level, either your brand enjoys legacy brand equity or your brand has created strong memories through powerful and creative advertising. Memories take time to build and strong brand memories require consistent great advertising
Any brand’s chance to succeed in the world of the Echo or the Google Home depends on its ability to recognise “voice” as another channel riddled with market imperfections. The strategy should be to find a way around these imperfections or forge a path through it. A relevant saying in the world of strategy is knowing “what not to do” as equally as knowing “what to do”. Numerous product categories are not voice ready and won’t be for many years to come.
I can easily give Alexa a voice command to order Tropicana fruit juice right down to the low sugar variant (Trop50), the size (500ml or 1 ltr) and a single or multipack. For my favourite pair of jeans, I will very easily give the ‘brand’ command along with the ‘waist’ size, but will struggle to remember the length and would like to still see visually the difference between a slim-fit and an ultra slim-fit. It is almost robotic to order the same tortilla from Tortilla every time (a perfect skill for Alexa to master) but it is difficult to order formal shirts on each occasion (unless you are a fashion prisoner who has only white shirts in his cupboard from the same brand).
An effective “voice strategy” should treat voice as a channel, and not some kind of rocket science. Any brand serious about voice should invest in creating communications that can be translated into meaningful but simple conversations. Teaching Alexa a skill, which could involve learning how to navigate and use your brand’s app (especially useful for new age service providers like Uber and Just Eat) is all about having effective decision trees. If it is about effectively navigating your brand’s portfolio showcased on Amazon, then it is about teaching Alexa how to navigate the range and the brand architecture.
Selling a brand through a “voice” command requires sharper positioning and an attractive marketing mix. It doesn’t make any difference if the person selling is a human being or a home assistance with an AI-enabled platform.
