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HSN: Where Multi-Channel Becomes Even More Multi

Written by Evan Schuman
February 3rd, 2010
When Brian Bradley left Circuit City as its senior vice president, Multi-Channel (well, more precisely, when Circuit City went out of business and left Bradley and tons of others unemployed), years after having worked at J.C. Penney, he felt that he had a good handle on retail merged-channel, cross-channel and multi-channel issues. But when he began his new gig as executive vice president at HSN (formerly the Home Shopping Network), Bradley discovered television as another retail channel and started looking at customer interactions very differently.

One of Bradley's first takeaways from the $2.8 billion HSN was that consumers' interactions with content are strongly influenced by their physical location. Why? It's expectation. Consumers see brick-and-mortars as places to look, touch and buy products. Video demos feel out of place in that context. At home watching TV, however, the expectations are much more tolerant. "Depending on where a person physically is can dictate how you can have their attention," Bradley said. "Out on the street? She'll have seconds. In-store? A minute or two. On the Web? Maybe 15 minutes. But on the TV? Hours. People go to the Web with certain goals in mind. There's a lot of bouncing back and forth as they're trying to solve a problem. There's more ADD, bouncing around."

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2 Comments | Read HSN: Where Multi-Channel Becomes Even More Multi

  1. Fabien Tiburce / Compliantia Says:
    February 3rd, 2010 at 2:00 pm

    What a great reminder that we should never deploy technology just “because we can”. Consumer behavior and usability (watch what users do, not what they say), not technology for its own sake, ought to drive technology selection. I am also reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s famous “the medium is the message”. Adapt the message and purpose to the medium if you want to be successful.

  2. Suzy Meriwether Says:
    February 4th, 2010 at 10:43 am

    I think ‘even more multi’ is right on. I think it’s multi-channel, mult-times, and retailers, service providers and others need to understand that. I’ll see it on TV, I’ll go on line ot look up details, I’ll tweet about it to see if friends have used it, go to the store to look at it then buy on-line. The companies that win will be the companies that can have a single, seamless converstation with me as I go across multiple channels multiple times.

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