is integrating stores globally into its bullish – “impossible is nothing” – omni-channel model. Increasingly, it is the phone which is the hub for continuous commerce, the place where all the channels converge. It follows that social media (supporting commerce, but not, please, “social commerce”) offers a particularly acute portal to satisfying the psychology of shopping. As consumer psychologist Paul Marsden has pointed out, it can harness our human capacity for social learning. Social psychology teaches us that shoppers indulge in “thin-slicing” – screening out most information, and retaining thin slices of important information kindled by cues, along with a set of pre-programmed rules. These latter are the heuristics. For instance, one heuristic concerns the benefit of following what others do. They can’t be wrong. This is all about social proof. Our Brazilian client – Magazine Luiza – is at the leading edge. Frederico, the CEO, knows the power of proof. He has launched social buying sites which perfectly match the Brazilian passion for social networking to the high penetration rate of direct sales. The concept was Magazine Voce (Your Store). It allows Facebook users to select up to 50 of their favourite items. If a friend makes a purchase based on one of these recommendations – showing proof – Magazine Luiza fulfills the order and pays the referring friend a commission. For brands, continuous commerce says that a brand should not behave differently in a marketing mode to how it behaves in a sales mode. That often has not been the case, as different owners in the organization had responsibility for each. Those days of extreme silos must be numbered, though, in my experience they linger still to a surprising degree. A brand where they’ve been collapsed – and one where it is mission critical that this should be so – is Huggies. Do you know how many diapers in the US are sold through online retail? In 2017, it is estimated to be 22.4 per cent of all sales, according to Tabs Analytics. They found that ecommerce diaper sales grew even amidst a contraction in the whole category. Relationship There’s a word that’s missing from hardcore ecommerce, and that’s emotion – and