Listening to the customer is valuable in any market. Shirel Oded, Digital, E-commerce and Marketing Director for Estee Lauder Companies explained that Estee Lauder understood very early that the pandemic will make waves that will last beyond COVID-19.
"Some women shop online, some women shop offline, some do both. This is the new normal."
Shirel Oded, Digital, E-commerce & Marketing Director for Estee Lauder Companies Israel
Oded spoke at the Women’s Entrepreneurship Summit in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening. “This was the beginning of the shift to online business,” she said. “Some women shop online, some women shop offline, some do both. This is the new normal.”
To maintain the shopping feel even in the digital world, the company decided to bring some of their retailers into the online field to provide customer service in the same manner as they would in person.
“There is no way to go back from this new normal. It’s a matter of how you make customers feel,” she said.
Such a decision by the customer may not be a conscious one. Indeed, of our decisions, 80% are done without conscious control, according to Liraz Margalit, digital psychologist and co-founder of Topicx, an AI-powered marketing research platform.
“We like to think we have control, we have free will, but most of our behavior is done because of factors in our environment,” Margalit explained. This kind of understanding, she said, can help a company make strategic decisions; for example, a gaming company can decide when to make a player lose to keep them playing.
The new normal
Indeed, formulating a new norm is far from an easy venture. Michal Ziso, CEO of Ziso and the Sleep, knows this all too well.
“Thinking about space can prepare us for Earth’s future,” she explained. “Our brains are wired for safety, and what is not safe is change. I got into the space industry because I understood that ... More diverse people are becoming astronauts, so their environments should not only sustain them... but also we have to take care of their well-being.”
Ziso said that when designing for space, there must be a new method for eating, sleeping and even breathing. Indeed, the company she founded, the Sleep, is a trailblazer that developed the field of human-centered design in space with a focus on sleep.
“In space, we have the holy grail of sustainability,” she said. “This type of closed-loop architecture and thinking can help us design for here on Earth and prepare for times that maybe we’ll have pollution or quarantine.”