“Voice commerce is going to be the next big thing.”

Sound familiar?

It’s an exciting idea. It was also a popular one a couple of years ago, when the dizzying surge in the popularity of voice assistants prompted a groundswell of speculation about how sellers could capitalise on this new platform.

The prophesied voice commerce era made for great headlines. And the allure of the anticipated market shift wasn’t lost on agencies, a small but vocal handful of whom scrambled to add voice app development to their service offerings.

Only these days, sellers holding their breath for the “voice commerce revolution” are starting to get blue in the face.

We expected fireworks, and what we got was a puff of smoke.

For reasons which continue to draw speculation—lack of trust, lack of visuals, or just plain lack of excitement—the use of voice assistants as a sales channel just hasn’t taken off as expected. Bath time meditation sounds and “Alexa, reorder toothpaste” are a far cry from the pyrotechnics that prophets of the voice commerce epoch were hoping for.

Now forced to reconsider their promises that voice tech will revolutionize shopping as we know it, most of the aforementioned voice app agencies have limply resorted to some variant of “it’s great for brand engagement.”

The obvious question for eCommerce brands remains a pertinent one: Is voice tech worth bothering with?

For sellers with the Amazon’s Choice badge, it might be.

Shoppers browsing on voice assistants obviously don’t have as much to work with when choosing a product. Amazon’s solution? More often than not, when shoppers search using Alexa, Amazon’s algorithm defaults to recommending whichever product has the Amazon’s Choice badge for the search term.

It’s not clear that there are any meaningful action points in here besides “make sure you’ve got the Amazon’s Choice badge,” but if your product fits into a category that might feasibly lend itself to voice shoppers (i.e. it’s lower-value, and customers don’t require a world of information before purchase), the voice search factor is worthy of consideration when deciding just how hard to push for that coveted badge.

Meanwhile, the trite-sounding argument that a custom voice app can improve your “brand engagement” is not altogether without merit.

Counting among their ranks Uber, Domino’s and Patrón, a growing number of brands are successfully leveraging Alexa skills—voice apps that anyone with an Alexa can download to add to their smart speaker’s functionality—to provide unique branded experiences for customers.

Uber and Domino’s use the platform to make placing orders even more seamless, while it’s easy to see the appeal of Patrón’s offering—a voice-activated selection of cocktail recipes that enables budding bartenders to craft tipples of their choice using the ingredients they’ve already got in the house.

Notably, all 3 examples address a genuine need: It’s less hassle to use your voice for the job than a mobile phone or recipe book. The lesson here is that the success of a voice app hinges on empowering customers to do something that would be more difficult through a different medium. An Alexa-based newspaper probably wouldn’t go down so well.

It’s not going to supplant A+ Content as a branding must-have any time soon, but if there’s a legitimate value-add there, a solid voice app can bolster the strength of your brand in a way that few competitors will be able to match.

On a broader scale, these use cases have done little to change the prevailing view of voice assistants as “a solution looking for a problem.”

Developing a voice presence for a brand means expending resources—both finances and strategic bandwidth—on a business development channel which struggles to be anything except a gamble. It’s a rare C-suite exec who’ll sign off a 5-figure budget for a project simply “because it’s cool.”

And there’s no shortage of work that’s gone into trying to make these tools useful. You’d be hard-pressed to find a richer concentration of talent than that which exists in the voice tech community. The cabal of enthusiasts includes some monumentally smart people—making it all the more surprising that, on the cusp of 2022, no-one’s quite figured out what to do with it yet.

In many cases, voice tech therefore remains the preserve of those brands with the mettle to pioneer an uncharted realm of the branding map; those prepared to walk an untrodden path, not knowing whether they’ll find a barren wasteland or a bountiful wellspring at the end of it.

Even still, confused brands can take recourse in one enduring tenet of business success: If in doubt, provide value.

The key takeaway is that if investing in a voice presence has the potential to genuinely enrich your customers’ experience with your brand, it’s worth considering—in the same spirit that you’d consider any other value-add.

Will it make sense in your case? Unsurprisingly, there’s no cookie-cutter answer. The debate over use cases is still hotly contested, and at this embryonic stage in the game, the playbook hasn’t been written yet.

Perhaps it’s telling that as today’s eCommerce landscape has evolved, so much has been made of the need to develop a “voice” for your brand. Whether that statement should be taken literally or figuratively, the jury’s still out.

——————————

Whether or not you see the potential in voice branding for your business, knowing the rules of the Amazon board game remains essential if you want to grow your revenue sustainably. The Hawker’s Club are here to help you achieve stable profit growth with certainty, leveraging little-known metrics to make sure your brand’s scoring an A+ on Amazon’s own internal scorecard.