CTC is an attempt to address one of the major shortcomings of DTC. Namely, most brands don’t have a relationship with the end-user, and therefore their products don’t necessarily have a context, as would be provided by which retailers are presenting it, and which collections it appears in. Colloquially, “borrowing other people’s audience” gives the consumer a starting point of how/where a product fits in with their other purchases and their lifestyle. CTC may still come up short, in that a product’s context is likely to be only viewed by the proximity to other products on social media, as opposed to curated in collections by a consumer’s chosen arbiters of taste.

CTC sounds like a new name for centuries old thinking. Retail has always been about connecting to the consumer. It’s the How and Where and When that keeps changing.

Dion highlighted the biggest challenge for DTC — a relationship. There are unique situations with a unique product offering in which the DTC site is the only place to get the product. Essentially the relationship between the online shopper is with Amazon, Walmart, Target, and others. If you want eyes, DTC is not the way to go.

Social commerce, owned retail, and e-commerce would all seem to be part of the direct-to-consumer realm. If anything, more brands are revisiting wholesale as they see the value of harnessing others’ existing physical and digital assets. As Dion pointed out, context matters.

I agree with Jeff. CTC is just consultant/analyst talk for retailing. As for DTC, it will continue to be more effective in some categories, like customizable tech and apparel, and less in others, like most FMCPG.

CTC is just another shotgun marketing version of DTC. It is not just how one markets the message (and the product) to the consumer as much as what is marketed to the consumer (price, product, channel). Differentiated product marketing is still key to targeting a product message, no matter what it is called.

Another day, another load of crap, sorry. Building direct relationships with customers across channels, including direct, is nothing new. Nor is the fact that so many companies are so bad at it. The value in zero- and first-party data is coming to the fore only because the automated digital advertising model is now more obviously failing than it was before and it is forcing companies to have to be better at building relationships directly with their customers, regardless of their distribution, but rather in tandem with it, whether it’s direct, indirect, digital, analog or hybrid. The slide in stocks, especially in a market that was way over bought and is correcting (appropriately) merely reflects that companies aren’t very good at relationship marketing (or loyalty marketing) or delivering a great customer experience. Call it what you want, but as Peter Drucker wrote years ago, the purpose of a business is to create a customer. Sustaining value yield from that customer is the obvious corollary and one that has been consistently under appreciated and underinvested in. Except… Read more »

So … it’s all about doing business well? I hate it when sexy new initials are created but only mean avoiding the errors of the last thing.

DTC fails when it is attempted for mass scale. There is no way to mass scale except through physical stores. This has been known for decades, only every now and then a group of investors think they’ve discovered it as an entirely new thing. Nope.

The two glaring challenges with DTC are the high marketing and distribution costs. A DTC needs to first compete with well-established and deep-pocketed brands to establish itself and gain share of voice, and then it needs to get the products in the hands of customers, who are widely dispersed. It shouldn’t be a surprise that profitability is out-of-reach.

For retailers, the largest expense is usually rent, but having a store in a high traffic location serves two purposes: it makes the brand visible to potential shoppers and it enables the distribution of the goods. A DTC needs to find customers whereas in retail the customer finds you. The only way DTCs can work (when they do finally find those customers) is with high margin products that can absorb the shipping costs, and a fulfillment strategy that minimizes those costs.

I’m a little perplexed here; how does the DTC model differ from the CTC model? The DTC approach, in my opinion, aims to initiate direct relationships with customers while also focusing on providing a unified customer experience across all brand channels. Furthermore, brands such as Allbirds and Warby Parker have already established a direct connection with their customers.

As a result, introducing a new term is illogical until it is supported by some key distinguishing features. In order to cultivate direct relationships with customers, brands, in my opinion, will continue to take a DTC approach.

Seems like CTC is simply an unnecessary acronym for omnichannel.