FEATURES
Retail Trends and Challenges Dynamic, Informed Consumers More informed and connected than ever, today’s
consumer can easily collect and exchange information on products and offers through a growing number of interaction points, including tweets, texts and online stores. Social networking rapidly publicizes the customer experience, both positive and negative. Powerful new mobile applications enable research and purchasing from anywhere at any time. Hundreds of Websites dedicated to comparison shopping provide detailed specs, pricing and availability on thousands of brands and products anywhere in the world, in seconds. Much of this information interaction is two-way: retailers, brand sites and consumer-product manufacturers constantly solicit product feedback and reviews. Did the buyer like the product? Would he or she recommend it to a friend? Was there a problem? Was it resolved? Detail plus availability makes consumer feedback more powerful than ever.
The Evolving Store Experience The traditional storefront—far from being the main
place to gather product information—is often the last stop on the buyer’s journey. After reading online product reviews and searching for special offers, many consumers arrive at a store knowing exactly what they want. Mobile devices and smartphones allow for research even when the product is in hand, so the retailer must be ready to interact with a well-informed consumer. Embracing online price comparison, some retail giants—with actively promoted lowest-price guarantees—are known to search the Internet on behalf of in-store customers to ensure the lowest advertised price. Such real-time, personalized offers keep the sale from going elsewhere.
Fast Retailing Rapid-fire product introductions are bringing products
to market with unprecedented speed. Fast retailing requires analytical applications to bring intelligence to internal and external data, and to provide insight into what is selling where. Armed with incoming customer preference information, retailers can rapidly adjust assortments that attract new customers or respond to growing trends by immediately modifying orders or diverting products from one selling location or channel to another.
Multichannel Consistency In the challenging multichannel sales environment,
retailers need to ensure consistent brand execution across online, catalog and in-store sales. In one common
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scenario, a shopper goes online to research product prices, specifications and delivery options. He then visits a store to comparison shop, placing an order either in the store or online, with the option of home delivery. Such customers touch multiple channels before the final purchase; each interaction becomes part of the final brand connection. Rationalizing processes and execution with a single, overarching set of stock, sales and customer information supports consistent customer service, balanced and accurate stockholding and quality control across all channels. Buyers’ needs are met regardless of how and where each customer shops.
The Big Data Challenge Retailers are faced with ever-increasing data from a
range of sources: the internal supply chain (point-of-sale transactions, logistics data and sourcing information), social media, online platforms, market research, and customer relationship management nformation—even weather forecasts. The problem does not lie in access, but in data management and aggregation, since structures and standards are rarely consistent. Retailers struggle with logic problems and matching master-data objects such as stock-keeping units with market data from researchers that use unique product categories and codes. Processing the results as quickly as possible takes significant computing power and expertise. To make matters worse, data quickly age into irrelevancy. The challenge is to collect and manage heterogeneous
data from all these sources, then combine and analyze them as one complete picture. Doing so enables a retailer to:
better understand consumer demand; increase supply-chain transparency and optimization;
clarify views of the competition, enabling differentiation; and
offer information that closes the sale.
What Is Needed: Information That Matters Real-Time Data Analysis Informs Decisions Demand for information that supports real-time
decisions changes not monthly or weekly but by the day, hour and minute. In-memory computing reliably impacts performance as it happens. This information-management technology enables
retailers to collect, manage, analyze, provide and act on data in the moment. (See Figure 6-1). A structured methodology to identify information from an array of heterogeneous sources is a prerequisite for gathering
RETAIL PROPERTY INSIGHTS VOL. 20, NO. 1, 2013
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