This is a great thought provoking piece on rethinking what “work” is as we enter what is being called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where we are approaching a point period where you will theoretically be able to do everything with nothing [Ephemeralization].
The impact of mobile on this past holiday shopping season was projected to be huge, and huge it was. With final tallies coming in, spending via smartphone for online purchases hit $13 billion, based on a new study. That’s an increase of 59% from a year ago, according to comScore, and that’s just for the last two months of last year.
More and more retailers are adopting the Internet of Things. Many of them believe IoT will be their most important technological initiative of the decade. Now, new technologies have changed the way shoppers interact with retailers, and the shopping experience can be the retailer’s strategic differentiator.
With the Internet of Things, retailers can leverage intelligence to make strategic, informed business decisions that improve customer loyalty and associate effectiveness while creating exciting experiences for their shoppers.
Outlook Series’ Michael Lippis interviewed me to gain Zebra Technologies‘ perspective on how the Internet of Things is changing retail.
In 2013, worldwide video game industry revenue was $70.4 billion, compared to box office revenues of $35.9 billion. I dare you to find a key distribution channel Amazon is not participating in.
I’ve started thinking more and more about the application of “Design Thinking” to develop retail customer experiences. So what’s Design Thinking. Introduced at Stanford’s d.school, Design Thinking is an action bias approach to driving innovation. Given the transformative times retail is in, new approaches to unearthing meaningful value for customers is paramount for every retailer. Design Thinking gives you an approach to getting to that meaningful value. It starts with empathizing with the user, truly understand not only the user interactions but also what they are thinking, seeking an emotional place for the user. Then define the deeply your understanding of the problem. Note any and all observations, both those explicitly stated needs and those now understood insights. Now brainstorm solutions, pushing for quantity over quality at this time. This ideation should proceed without shame, no idea is a bad idea at this stage. Logical group the ideas, and then go through and select 2 to 5 ideas to prototype. Then test with your users, learning fast not being wedded to anyone idea. During this process, never forget the empathy you gained in the beginning, it should guide you through the hole process…What’s going to delight the customer.
Retailers are too caught up with trying to implement services or software to achieve a particular omnichannel capability. None of it is differentiating, but more status-quo in this new retailing world. I believe that retailers should look at the creation of experiences the same way that consumer tech companies develop software and hardware…with an eye on consumer needs and with a product management hat on. I presented this in 2013 at the annual meeting of The International Association of Clothing Design Executives.
Undoubtedly retailers have collected troves of transaction data on their customers. With advancements in analytics, they are now desperately trying to make sense of it all; over 50% have not been able to leverage their loyalty data in meaningful ways.
I believe that the data (corpus) retailers have on their customers is unfortunately not comprehensive enough, to reliably activate today’s shopper. That is, I do not think that retailers have a wide enough view of today’s shopper, and this leaves them exposed to those who do (e.g. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple). I would argue that retailers need to federate their customer data, and create a Real Customer Data Exchange (RCDE). I understand there will be PII [Personally Identifiable Information]concerns to work through, but going it alone doesn’t seem like the right solution for truly understanding today’s shopper. On this vein, I do believe that generally we will see a lot of consolidation in the retail industry in the months and years to come, but will be posting on that later.
Last night I spent 4 hours building an Ubuntu VM and writing my first Node.js script to interact with a product data web service. But I could not get this array to work… What’s my problem? Next, StackOverflow 🙂
The 2015 holiday season has made the major shifts in consumer buying patterns very clear. The rise of Internet shopping and growth of off-price retailing are mega-trends reshaping the retail industry. In 2016, retailers who want to survive will have to respond by restructuring. Internet sales are booming at the […]