With his latest gamble will Jérémy Dahan, the Globe Group’s “ambience man”, be able to boost the audience and sales of Moulinex, Samsung and Dior like Stéphane Courbit did with his Loft? Live shopping excites many actors, but there has only been one Stéphane Courbit, one Pierre Bellemare, one Oprah Winfrey.
Dior, Samsung, Moulinex, Casino, as well as many other brands and retailers are looking to animate or reanimate sales and traffic in shops. Jérémy Dahan has imagined for them, near the Avenue Foch in Paris, a place dedicated to the starlet of the moment: live shopping. Can the head of Globe Groupe succeed in imposing his one-stop-shopping concept of live commerce? Here are the first elements of an answer.
Just as a certain Cyril Hanouna is almost at home on C8, brands wishing to test the virtues and metrics associated with live shopping are almost at home in the heart of the 1,500 square meters and 37 dedicated showrooms that Globe Groupe has just created in the beautiful Parisian districts. They are expected and hoped for by the owner and his team. A unique space, heir to both Cognacq-Jay (the former Antenne 2 television studios) and Pierre Bellemare’s teleshopping. Moulinex, Heineken, luxury brands and cosmetics companies come here to design and test interactive live shopping sessions, in one-to-many mode or in personalized sessions. The founder’s passion of Globe Groupe and his team is real and contagious, as is their intimate knowledge of the challenges facing retail brands.
Offering major brands a unique area for experimentation, judiciously located and equipped so that they can come and taste the virtues and benefits of live shopping, testing the golden rules and constraints, this is the major project of the founder of Globe Group, a player specializing in the increasingly vital business of Shopping Experience: Now lazy or concerned about preserving the planet, consumers, whether they are lovers of lipstick or household robots, think twice before going to the shops or supermarkets, but they have understood that with a screen and as long as a successor 3. 0 successor to Pierre Bellemare is willing to advise them or do the unpacking, live shopping is part of the answer to the recovery of business and commerce. In China, figures and usage are exploding.
How does it work? In a quiet, middle-class neighborhood (near the Avenue Foch), Globe Groupe has created from scratch, in a vast space on the ground floor, a virtually new, fully-integrated home-shopping channel: control room, recording, live-streaming, post-production, it’s almost like those gigantic production and recording studios located in the Plaine Saint-Denis: everything on the spot. Capsules (closed rooms) allow a brand to stage its product, to film short sequences and video films in which a promoter or a product specialist details the sales arguments or presents the product in dialogue with an Internet user. The sequence can take place live (one to many) as in a television or radio program during which viewers intervene to ask their questions, or live one-to-one, or even deferred. The sequence is then, after it has been produced to adapt to all screen formats or viewing modes, broadcast in replay and can be consulted by anyone who wants advice, to see the product or to listen to the presentation that has been made by the promoter chosen by the brand. At the same location, advisors hired by Globe react via chat, SMS or social networks to requests for conversation that the viewing of the sequence generates.
The main advantages of live shopping are the staging of the product and the possibility: to recreate a pre-purchase and purchase experience similar to that of a visit to a shop; to allow a conversation between a customer and the brand’s advisor. For a major luxury brand, for example, or for Moulinex, the Internet user can ask for personalized advice that will justify a session that will be requested directly on the perfume or jewelry brand’s website. In the same way that Apple offers to schedule an appointment in the Apple Store to change your battery, on a predefined time slot, these personalized sessions create an opportunity for advice and an almost intimate conversation. This is often what interested prospects expect for technical or expensive products.
What we wanted to create here,” explains the founder of Globe Groupe, who worked for LVMH in New York years ago, “is an extension of our usual business: we are promoters of brands, which ask us to set up sales teams, install point-of-sale displays, and promote a new range of products, throughout France, within a short timeframe. Finding and delegating in-store demonstrators, as we will soon be doing for a competitor of Devialet, to present the product is complex and above all at the heart of the modern shopping experience. It is still in shops that the traffic of buyers is the most significant, in normal periods. Moreover, retailers increasingly need in their business model to be paid for this traffic, this audience that they generate. If FNAC wants to compete with Amazon, which it is beginning to do, it will increasingly create shop-in-shops, environments dedicated to a brand, with an enthusiast for the products of the brand in question. Live shopping is a cousin of this experience, outside of shops.
When asked if there is still a future for this passionate and educational boss in the face of the Amazon roller, which has set high standards for the customer experience and the customer journey, the answer is quick and reflects the visitor’s attention to detail, even in his daily shopping: “Of course, Decathlon, for example, succeeds. You go there to buy a tent, it’s in stock, within a wide range, but in addition, the advisor immediately continues: “I recommend this one. On my last trip etc.”. Their advisors are passionate, adept and testers of the products they recommend. Believe me, that makes all the difference, and in this area, the brand has really achieve.
Let’s talk about the salespeople, the demonstrators, Mr Dahan. Are they difficult to find, to animate, to motivate, that antiphon we hear everywhere? I’m really wary of the “it was better before, young people don’t want to work anymore”, etc. Of course, it is undeniable that motivation at work is no longer or not the absolute rule, if it ever was. But this is the world we live in and to which we must adapt. For our part, for example, we have decided to pay salaries or fees by the week, which is quite a cash advance and amounts to millions. This is a very concrete example of what we are doing at Globe Group to retain our employees, who are paid more or less the same everywhere. We are always thinking about how we can improve the employee experience and make them more loyal to our company.
Assembler of skills, organizer, atmospherist, promoter of new shopping experiences, the group, which is established in various European countries, has understood the benefits of embracing technology: at the heart of the Parisian Globe Live Shopping, the capsules are all equipped with the latest technical solutions, with backgrounds to create atmospheres that plunge the surfer into the world of cooking or high-tech objects (see photo on the front page). And above all, it is well located: “The model or influencer who finishes her session at 9pm must be able to go out into the street and return home without being bothered. With the installation of this unique place, it is clear that the company intends to go after TV shopping groups, such as the one created by Jérome Dillard (M6 Boutique, Teleshopping), or even technological solutions that offer brands the opportunity to test live shopping by equipping themselves with specific software, such as OnLive.Site or Spockee. Of course, the price and uses of these options differ.
A little history: the first Peep Show Live was set up in New York fifty years ago (1972). Giving and offering to see a product in order to make people want to buy it is therefore not a new experience, nor is it solitary or reserved for a certain trade. Don’t be misled (by its location near famous back alleys): the Globe Groupe Parisian Live Show Center is brand-approved, respectable: no red or flashing neon lights in the quiet street where it is located, and its neighbor is a renowned accounting auditing group.
Manuel Jacquinet
Front page photo: a booth dedicated to brands of kitchen utensils or foodstuffs, where the decor and staging are prepared and already installed
