Through a special arrangement, what follows is a summary of an article from Retail Paradox, RSR Research’s weekly analysis on emerging issues facing retailers, presented here for discussion.
I remember attending a conference a couple of years ago, where, at the conclusion, people around me were saying to each other, “I don’t know what the organizers are going to do next year. Omni-channel is done — we’ve figured it out and now we have to do it.”
At the time, I kind of agreed. It felt a lot like the tail end of the Internet Bubble in 2001, when people were holding up mobile as the next big thing. Yet it took until 2007 to get there in any meaningful way.
And at the same time, I look around at the retail shopping experience and think, “Where is the retail equivalent of flying cars?”
Despite at least 10 years of massive investments in brainpower trying to understand and predict what digital means for retail, the shopping experience in 2016 still looks an awful lot like the one you could get in 2007. To be really honest, it looks an awful lot like 1985 (when Doc Brown invented the time machine).
RSR’s latest benchmark report (due later this month) finds the disconnect is at the executive level, and it comes from having no clue what digital really means to the retail business.
I think the reasons are that today’s execs were raised in stores, practicing traditional merchandising and marketing. When faced with uncertainty, it’s easy to fall back on what you know. Two, generationally, these people are not digitally savvy. That’s probably not true in the specifics — my grandmother was teaching herself web page development nearly up to the day she passed away. But even then, using the tools is not the same as understanding how these digital tools change how customers see the world.
This isn’t about fixing the store, or even “creating a more seamless customer experience," a phrase I often hear thrown about. This is about understanding how technology — consumer-provided, retailer-provided — will continue to change shopping experiences. And, apparently, until retail executives develop a deeper sense of empathy along those lines, traditional retail will continue to fail to meet consumer expectations.
And those flying cars? They’re still nowhere to be seen.