Scroll to Shop: Mapping the Modern CJ
By Serena Muthukumarana
During my time at W5, I’ve had the opportunity to not only learn about consumer journey research, but also see the team execute numerous projects and understand how clients apply these insights to make a direct impact on consumers. Now, I find myself analyzing things I do with a researcher lens. Let's take graduation dress shopping as an example.
As my college roommates and I sat around the dinner table and discussed how we were finally accepting that we were in our final few months living together, we suddenly realized we had to prepare for graduation, get ready for the big day, and buy our graduation dresses.
We all grabbed our phones and scrolled through TikTok to see what people have worn in previous years, so we knew where and what to look for in our dresses. The influencers we watched daily like Spencer Barbosa and Shelby Sacco pop up with their premade Princess Polly, Aritzia, House of CB, and Revolve dress hauls like they had almost picked out dresses for us.
As we searched, we found hundreds of dresses well-tailored to our personalities and what we were likely to wear, with convenient discount codes and easily accessible website links selling the hauls. Within minutes we were showing each other the dresses we had picked out and especially favored. It was interesting to see what popped up on each of our suggested pages. Each dress selection fit each girl so well. It was like the algorithm already knew what we were looking for before we knew what we wanted.
We crossed-searched the dresses by taking screenshots and photo searching the dresses into every platform we could think of to compare prices and see any variations. This process was so familiar, yet so different than what my high school graduation dress buying process looked like only four years ago. As I went to check out my dress, I realized the process of shopping with my friends and family had completely changed. From dragging our moms through mall stores, to texting links and swapping videos of what others were wearing.
What started as what was available within my proximity grew to anything at our fingertips. What was trendy was what we saw in stores on mannequins only four years ago, but now, we had hundreds of dresses tailored and curated to our taste based on the ever so small interactions we have with the app. I wondered how could my rewatching of certain videos or sharing with others lead me and my friends to find our perfect graduation gowns in just seconds?
As the dresses showed up on our doorsteps in the days following, we excitedly alerted each other about our purchases, boasting about how the dresses were just what we had hoped for. The development and integration of AI search that had become a norm for me in just the past couple of years has completely transformed the sentimental moment of finding “the dress” with my favorite people. This low-stake search became a quick find. Whether I was planning it or not, the buying steps are little to none now and even in a “just looking” mindset, it’s easy to get lost in the convenience of it all. Instead of coordinating an outing specifically for a mall trip, we turned the dinner party into dress shopping. With the ability to shop and do just about anything at our fingertips, any occasion is transformable and any hangout becomes monumental.
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