Lessons from my Pretty Woman moment

I was three shirts, two trousers, a belt and a pair of loafers deep, and I thought to myself, how the hell did I end up here? I only have hand-luggage for goodness sake!

Was it simply the irresistible Italian style? Or was it just that everything fits my Five-Foot-Not-Quite-10-inch stature a little better in Italia, where my fellow vertically challenged brethren are the norm, not the exception? Sure, that made a difference but I think there was something else a little more irrational going on as I stood in a shabby little menswear store in Sicily saying ‘Si, grazie’ to almost everything Edoardo handed me over the curtain.

Edoardo, who ran the shop, had congratulated me on my perfetto Italian (It isn’t.) He had told me everything looked bellissimo on me. (It didn’t). And he had admired my shoulders. (What shoulders?) In short, he had absolutely buttered me up and charmed me and I was putty in his little hairy hands. The result? I was post-rationalising buying all these items that I didn’t need when the truth was, I just didn’t want to let him down. I was almost driven to rack and ruin by kindly feelings for a man who was a complete stranger 20 minutes before, and who I can confidently say, I will never, ever, see again.

After I had gathered myself from my whirlwind of purchases and made peace with how I would be able to hide it all from my husband when I got home, I started to think that maybe there had been a valuable lesson in all of this. A lesson in how our industry thinks about experience and commerce in a way that is overly rational, and risks losing touch with humanity and its long-term profitable halo effects.

People buy people, and people buy from people.

This is something we all know intuitively when it comes to our own sales funnels as agencies. How many painful hours have we all spent agonising over casting for a pitch, and calibrating chemistry sessions to the nth degree to make sure we give everything the best possible human touch? When push comes to shove, in the most important conversion moments for our own bottom line, humanity is the very last thing we sacrifice.

Yet consider how our industry has pushed an agenda of maximum efficiency and optimising for utility at every juncture of ‘CX’. Of course, self-checkouts, chatbots, and intuitive digital experiences have been a key part of many businesses’ successful digital transformations, but we must ensure we do not over-optimise and forget the factor that powerfully, emotionally, and irrationally makes people part with their cash – other humans.

Human beings in the last commercial mile of the digital age are becoming more, not less important. When I get a prompt on a screen to rate a service, I feel absolutely no compulsion to help whatsoever. But when I have talked to someone and they have told me that they’d appreciate it, then I do. Well, most of the time. And if I really connect with someone, I might even talk about their business, or post about it. In all these instances, there’s a human connection behind me actually taking the time to do it. And now, when discovery is driven by AI rankings, fed on the brands and businesses that get talked about and recommended, that little human connection starts to look less like an old-time luxury, and more like a necessity for modern survival.

I’m not naïve. I know that a smooth digital experience reduces drop off rates, fills baskets and keeps conversion rates high. These elements are easy to invest in and make the case for, because the data is so easy to measure. And generally, we invest in the things where the data is easy to see and understand. The value of the human touch might be harder to measure, but it is no less important. It may not be as direct, but it has broad shoulders, supporting everything from ATV to loyalty to WOM and yes, generative search rankings.

But if you want proof of the enduring power of the human touch to drive massive commercial success, then you don’t have to travel to a random shop in Sicily and spend an afternoon with Eduardo.

You can do it from the comfort of your own phone.

Have a spin on TikTok shop which just reached $64.3bn in global Gross Merchandise Value, representing a 71 X increase in growth over a four-year period. Or take a trip to Whatnot, the live shopping platform that has been valued at $20bn dollars, doubling its valuation in a year by making shopping a human-centric live spectator sport. Human salesmanship might seem like a notion from a bygone era. But it also just so happens to be the catalyst of the world’s fastest growing commerce platforms.

To ignore it would be a big mistake. Huge!

Matt Waksman is the head of strategy for Droga5 London