Innovations in online porn transformed what we do every day online, and may have helped destroy our high streets as a consequence. So why aren’t we letting the same innovation drive our high street shopping experiences?
Bear with me…. I’m gonna chat online porn for a bit.
I was walking through one of London’s less salubrious streets in Soho earlier today and was hit by the number of adult sex shops – of which there are many many many in Soho (our very central former red-light district) – with sandwich boards, dog-eared posters and window displays advertising – get this – their extensive selections of magazines and DVDs, with windows cluttered with sun-faded, dusty unmentionable items for sale. Not just one shop, but many.
What really struck me as odd is that the sheer contrast – the gulf, even – between the how the porn industry operates, innovates and sells online, and how it sells and operates in physical stores. And how closely this aligns with our failing tired high street shops and their respective much-more successful digital experiences.
Why am I interested in porn? Well… the porn industry has, since the dawn of the internet, been the driving force, the biggest influencer and the core innovator that has created the – clean – everyday internet we know and love today. It’s influence really cannot be understated.
Many years ago I gave a career-defining excruciatingly ill-received presentation to a FTSE 100 corporate Exec Team about what they needed to do to help their digital transformation ambitions. My strategic advice was simply “follow Porn”, and I still stand by it. Teaching them the fundamentals of online usability, content strategy, video, search, data-led decisions, navigation and this new thing called mobile was in itself a rather dry topic. I referred to best practice, but also – as a running theme – had a narrative about how Porn had introduced each and every innovation in each category. The point? If they wanted to keep ahead of the digitalisation curve and be innovative online, keep an eye on porn.
This was back in the day, 2011, when 25% of internet searches were porn-related, and social media had recently surpassed porn as the most popular online activity. Since then the online porn industry has spearheaded the move towards high quality free content, video streaming, creation and then abolition of log-in and payment gateways, instant messaging, growth hacking (one for another article), encryption (and privacy lobbying), Crypto Currency adoption, data-led decision-making and meaningful metric reporting, retargeted advertising, customer-centricity, SEO keyword strategies, many of the UX and navigations we see today, online payment gateways (that Pamela and Tommy video launched the first real-time payment verification technology), Virtual Reality…. I could go on, but the ubiquity online of these strategies and technologies is thanks largely to porn.
And yet… bar a tiny number of clearly well-funded rather smart adult shops (including Ann Summers, a store built on the customer-first acumen of the brilliant Jaqueline Gold – check out its case study if you can) every adult shop in the area is grim-looking, dirty, dusty, forgotten and rather sad. A two minute walk from Soho to Oxford Street, London’s busiest shopping street, reveals exactly the same experience, with bricks and mortar experiences unrecognisable to their online counterparts.
Our high street brands online are driven by tech innovation; from user experience to e-comm, influencer marketing to multi-channel purchase, sophisticated personalisation to digital customer experience, underpinned by immediate delivery and logistical innovation, and yet we seem to have forgotten to apply the same thirst for innovation and excitement to our high street bricks and mortars.
A walk into any high street store today reveals the same tedious shopping experience of 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Not one high street store could arguably be described up as having a physical retail experience today that is unrecognisable to that of a decade ago. No high street shopping experience is using ambitious in-store technology to meaningfully enhance the customer experience from front door to exit. Nothing screams ‘cutting edge’, nothing is game changing. We have simply forgotten to be brave, try things that may not work, shake sh1t up, or apply the learnings of our online experience into real life?
In a year where our high streets are losing recognisable brands old and new, hand over foot (Debenhams and Jack Wills currently on CPR, goodbye Karen Millen, BathStore, LK Bennet, Coast …) the question begs to be asked why we are not taking the same approach to our bricks and mortar as we do online?
Have we resigned ourselves to realising that only online presents the best – and only – opportunity for our retailers to innovate, or do we simply have the wrong people – traditional retail specialists – driving retail experiences traditionally when we should have the people thinking differently.
What am I trying to say? Innovation online was derived from the internet’s dirty but hugely popular secret. The people behind online XXX sites had to continuously innovate, push boundaries and think creatively to survive, and as a consequence created and delivered best-in-class innovations which game-changed how we buy online. Adult shops in the real world – with the exception of a handful of successful retailers like Ann Summers – haven’t needed to innovate as their online counterparts have largely because they, like their customers who still buy DVDs and magazines, have probably become resigned to the fact that they have a limited handful of years left.
As for our high street shops, they have succeeded online because the innovations they use had been created by others and applied elsewhere. I believe our high street stores still have life in them and are rife for innovation and saving, so instead of making nicer looking shoppy-looking shops which have not changed in generations, surely we should be looking to completely redesigning the physical retail experience from scratch? And instead of looking for more innovative store designers, let’s be slightly braver and look a new set of innovators to challenge the traditional thinking. If online porn dictated the way we Netflix and buy jeans online, who should we be looking to to define how we shop in real life before it’s too late?
True fact found in research: Utah has the most porn subscriptions per every 1,000 broadband users.
Over and out
