Retailers should leverage innovation for their businesses, but only with clearly-defined business cases and use cases for the investment. They should be cautious in building their own. There are plenty of great resources to partner, enter into a joint venture for or rent for this purpose! Innovation WILL rejuvenate the retail experience and needs to be a high priority discussion for every retailer.

Lowe’s should invest in people training and people selling — helping a shopper make a decision. Lowe’s has a few pros who know their processes in home repair and service. That is priority number one — not a Palo Alto robot that can display a YouTube video on doing tile. Anyone can do that. Get a real human to go through the tile process with the rookies.

Innovation has become a buzzword and has become the destination instead of a journey. One of the unspoken secrets about retailers is that one of the key drivers to integrate technology is to replace and/or remove people — employees — from the shopping equation. Brick-and-mortar retailers seem to want to create a store that is nothing more than a mindless, bland environment where shoppers come into a 100,000 square foot distribution center and find what they’re looking for and leave. Conversely, online retailers like Amazon are creating physical shopping environments that touch the shopper and create a seamless shopping ecosystem across all the channels that are available to the shopper — what many call omnichannel. Yesterday I went into a Lowe’s and asked an employee where I could find electric baseboard heating. He quickly opened an app/website on his mobile phone and found what I was looking for BUT no location in the store. He was confused, asked one of his associates who did exactly the same thing — nothing! They both guided me to… Read more »

I find that we often interpret innovation as meaning sexy technology and it is important to remember that is not always the case. The important thing for retailers is to understand their customers’ shopping journey and create great experiences that will have them coming back. These experiences may not involve a robot or even any form of technology but they will simplify or enhance the experience.

So yes, innovation is very important to retailers right now especially in improving the store experience and purpose but it doesn’t always have to be about tech. But that’s just my 2 cents.

Of course. We know consumers are changing and want different experiences in stores. Why would a retailer not innovate and experiment with new ways of doing things?

Walk into Lowe’s and you will see a large kiosk that is supposed to be a product locator. I believe it interacts with their app — I’m not sure as I’ve never been compelled to try out the process. I’ve never seen a person using it. I would imagine (and I don’t have a research lab in my office so I am at a disadvantage here) that customers don’t use this kiosk to find a product because 1.) It’s annoying to have to go through the screens; 2.) The customer doesn’t know what the product is called so searching is difficult; 3.) The customer is looking for a solution to a problem, not a product and; 4.) The customer hopes that by walking into a store they will receive some assistance or else they would have stayed at home and ordered the product online. The ideas covered in the article all seem like overly-expensive ways to try to make Lowe’s appear to be an innovator while in reality offering little real value to their customer.… Read more »

Recent media reports have described a “retail apocalypse,” noting the biggest wave of retail closures in decades. “Apocalypse” may be too strong of a word, but there’s no doubt a major shakeout is imminent and those retailers which are able to innovate and adapt to changes will be the ones who survive. Yes, brick-and-mortar retailers do need to invest in innovation — the strategy of doing the same thing because it’s always worked before is no longer valid. Not all of Lowe’s experiments will work, but that’s the point of experimentation. A common theme among all of their innovations, however, is that they appeal to a strong emotional motivator. People don’t just shop at Lowe’s because they need to buy spackle. They shop there because they have an emotional need to enjoy a beautiful home and they find it satisfying to do the work themselves. Those innovations that appeal to these motivators — such as the virtual reality “how to” training and visualization tools — will go a long way towards helping Lowe’s survive and… Read more »

No! No need for any innovation at these stores. No one wants to spend time in them. The only thing Lowe’s, like Home Depot, needs is to actually have people working in the stores who are available and knowledgeable. You walk into these gigantic stores and have no idea where anything is. Then when you have a question, the workers say it’s not their department. My mom goes to Ace Hardware because they are smaller and have fantastic service, they help her from the front door and get her exactly what she needs in 20 seconds while I sit in the car. I don’t dread her going there. Plus when you go to Lowe’s you have to go back 14 times because they never ever have everything you need. They should tell you at checkout, Oh BTW you need light bulbs for that light! But they don’t! Suggestion: If I was consulting for Lowe’s and Home Depot or any store like them I would have them make thousands of really good informative YouTube video tutorials… Read more »

We are in a period of accelerated innovation in retail. The quantity and quality of retail tech innovations introduced in the last few years is a new phenomena in the retail industry, traditionally a conservative non-innovative industry. To survive, brick-and-mortar retailers must adopt new technologies while not giving up on the basics — customer experience, service quality, human touch, efficient checkout, etc. Retailers’ own innovation labs can be a source of new concepts to adopt within the retailers’ environment. A different approach can be to cooperate with external incubators or innovation labs that focus on retail tech. I believe that partnering with external innovation labs would me more efficient and would yield a higher value.

Innovation labs are critical to the future of retail — they are the incubators of the Store of the Future.
But the successful innovators will focus on the needs of the shopper first and cool technology second. Let shoppers and their “jobs to be done” drive the process of invention. Otherwise, the initiative can become a solution in search of a problem.

I’m not sure I can whole heartedly endorse the ROI/business case approach to gating innovation. The reality behind innovation is that true innovation is almost impossible to associate with a valid and reasonable business case and rigorous ROI forecast. That’s sort of the nature of an innovation — something completely new. I also see what and how Amazon manages innovation and do not believe that the business case approach is a primary tactic. Of course, with seemingly inexhaustible capital and resources, Amazon becomes a model-breaker under any circumstances. Still, it may behoove us to think of innovation as requiring an innovative set of management principles.

Brick and mortar retailers typically have a web presence as well, where they test and analyze new ideas constantly. They should take the same rigorous approach to the physical store. I think they most promising idea for Lowe’s is Holoroom — the ability to step inside a remodel and experience it virtually will benefit the customer and help drive sales.

Big ideas cost a lot of money. This is a good thing if the idea actually improves the bottom line by increasing turn or margin for any reason(s). A measurement method used to predict if an improvement will enhance sales is to judge if the improvement is unique to the criterion of a sale from a seller’s perspective as priority equal to the consumers. Providing high quality design and test methods for feasibility and or practicality studies is not a guarantee of capturing a customers business. It is simply a free shopping list that consumers exit stores with everyday to shop price and get delivery online. There are additional reasons for providing electronic design, product locator and information needs that may need addressing prior to your company’s future investments. It is first necessary to accept and understand why retailers are in a frenzy to create productive hands-free information technology solutions to the consumer. Executive management is constantly reminded of the tireless work ethic and predictability of programmed machinery. These qualities when successfully implemented to a… Read more »

Yes, I think that many major brick and mortar retailers have fallen behind when it comes to innovation, instead focusing a lot on things that will make only small incremental improvements. For many large retailers, finding a way to get consumers excited about coming into the store has become critical to survival.

While technologies like RFID provide great data for retailers, they don’t provide a better or more innovative experience for consumers. Couple this with the fact that large format stores are hard to navigate and AR offers a very compelling solution for consumers that’s both exciting because it’s new and innovative, and incredibly useful because it means they can shop a full store without the hassle of searching around something the size of a football stadium.