The act of ‘social shopping’ has evolved over the last few decades.
We have seen shopping migrate from purely offline – purchasing items with the approval of friends by your side – to being socially activated online – purchasing via new affirmative networks in Pinterest, Polyvore and Svpply.
In 2012 this new crop of ‘curated commerce’ destinations are starting to gain traction.
What is ‘curated commerce’ you ask? Think of it simply as online social networks which let people tag any interesting thing they find online to profile pages. The majority of tags are either products or images, which link back to brands’ e-commerce websites in some way so that users can ultimately purchase what inspires them.
As with most digital innovation, these sites are enabling people to do the things they’ve always done; just in a much more immediate, seamless and public way.
Their real success, however, lies not in the channel, but in their ability to tap into intrinsic human behaviours, five of which are discussed below:
1. Our primal hardwiring to hunt and gather:
We want to keep things that make us feel good and we like knowing they are kept somewhere safe – a treasured shoebox full of life’s memorabilia.
By hunting through the web and other people’s curated profiles, users can gather, or ‘curate’, objects of desire to bring back to their own profile pages.
2. Our desire for instant gratification:
From early childhood, the natural human desire is to have what we want right now.
Curated commerce sites allow for instant gratification through their ‘Buy Later’ or ‘Pin It’ Buttons integrated into the Bookmarks Bar of the user’s search engine. This makes it possible to see desirable content from across the web and attain it immediately.
3. Our guilt-avoidance instincts:
Think of window shopping – browsing shops with no intent to purchase takes away the guilt or financial constraints.
Similarly for curated commerce, the transaction is separated from the browsing experience, so any post-purchase dissonance is removed from the user’s relation with the site.
4. Our innate herding mentality:
When social groups form, it is likely the herd will move together. 'Benign' herding behaviours occur frequently in everyday decisions based on learning from the information, opinions and preferences of others.
Likewise, these sites provide the user with the means to find and ‘follow’ like-minded people with whom they would otherwise have no opportunity to in real life or in other social media channels.
5. Our basic need for self-actualisation:
We all have an urge to express ourselves. This comes down to the desire to create our ideal selves and our dreams; and showcase these to the world.
At its most basic form, curated commerce provides a simple and visually rich public forum for creative self-expression. It is the overtly conspicuous nature of sharing this curated content that makes these tools fun to use in the first place.
A part of self-actualisation is also a desire to seek validation in our everyday decisions or actions. A simple validation mechanism is harnessed in the default settings of these sites, which notifies the user by email of others’ interactions with their posts.
Seeing this instant interaction with content they have shared provides powerful positive reinforcement for users to keep engaging with the site.
By starting with a deep understanding of the innate human behaviours being appeased by curated commerce sites, brands can leverage the power of the ‘social shopping’ evolution. If harnessed correctly, this knowledge will provide brands a new opportunity to engage with their consumers in richer and more meaningful ways.
Katherine Paphitis
Strategy Planner
M&C Saatchi
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