Evolve or Die: Analytics and Retail

In my last three posts, I assessed the basic technologies (wifi, camera, etc.) for in-store customer measurement and took a good hard look at the state of the analytics platforms using that measurement. My conclusion? The technologies are challenging but, deployed properly, can work at scale for a reasonable cost. The analytics platforms, on the other hand, have huge gaping holes that seriously limit the ability of analysts to use that data. Our DM1 platform is designed to solve most (I hope all) of those problems. But it’s not worth convincing anyone that DM1 is a better solution unless people get why this whole class of solution is so important.

Over about the same amount of time as those posts, I’ve seen multiple stories on the crisis in mall real-estate, the massive disruption driven in physical retail when eCommerce cross sales thresholds as a percentage of total purchases, and the historical and historically depressing pace of store closings in 2017.

It’s bad out there. No…that doesn’t really capture things. For lots of folks, this is potentially an extinction level event. It’s a simple Darwinian equation:

Evolve or die.

And people get that. The pace of innovation and change in retail has never been as high. Is it high enough? Probably not. But retailers and mall operators are exploring a huge number of paths to find competitive advantage. At a high-level, those paths are obvious and easily understood.

Omni-Channel is Key: You can’t out-compete in pure digital with “he who must not be named”…so your stores have to be a competitive advantage not an anchor. How does that happen? Integration of the digital experience – from desktop to mobile – with the store. Delivering convenience, experience, and personalization in ways that can’t be done in the purely digital realm.

Experience is Everything: If people have to WANT to go to stores (in a line I’ve borrowed from Lee Peterson that I absolutely love), delivering an experience is the bottom line necessary to success. What that experience should be is, obviously, much less clear and much more unique to each business. Is it in-store digital experiences like Oak Labs’ delivers – something that combines a highly-customized digital shopping experience integrated right into the store operation? Is it bringing more and better human elements to the table with personalized clienteling? Is it a fundamentally different mix of retail and experience providers sharing a common environment? It’s all of these and more, of course.

The Store as a Complex Ecosystem: A lot of factors drive the in-store experience. The way the store is laid out. The merchandising. The product itself. Presentations. In-store promotions. Associate placement, density, training and role. The digital environment. Music. Weather. It’s complicated. So changing one factor is never going to be a solution.  Retail professionals have both informed and instinctive knowledge of many of these factors. They have years of anecdotal evidence and real data from one-off studies and point-of-sale. What they don’t have is any way to consistently and comprehensively measure the increasingly complex interactions in the ecosystem. And, of course, the more things change, the less we all know. But part of what’s involved in winning in retail is getting better at what makes the store a store. Better inventory management. Better presentation. Better associates and better clienteling strategies. Part of winning in a massively disrupted environment is just being really good at what you do.

The Store in an Integrated Environment: Physical synergies exist in a way that online synergies don’t. In the friction free world of the internet, there’s precious little reason to embed one web site inside another. But in the physical world, it can be a godsend to have a coffee bar inside the store while my daughters shop! Taking advantage of those synergies may mean blending different levels of retail (craft shows, farmers markets) with traditional retail, integrating experiences (climbing walls, VR movies) or taking advantage of otherwise unusable real-estate to create traffic draws (museums, shared return centers).

In one sense, all of these things are obvious. But none of them are a strategy. They’re just words that point in a general direction to real decisions that people have to make around changes that turn out to be really hard and complex. That’s where analytics comes in and that’s why customer journey measurement is critically important right now.

Because nobody knows A) The right ways to actually solve these problems and  B) How well the things they’re trying to do are actually working.

Think about it. In the past, Point of Sale data was the ultimate “scoreboard” metric in retail and traffic was the equivalent for malls. It’s all that really mattered and it was enough to make most optimization decisions. Now, look at the strategies I just enumerated: omni-channel, delivering experience, optimizing the ecosystem and integrating broader environments…

Point-of-Sale and traffic measure any of that?

Not really. And certainly, they don’t measure it well enough to drive optimization and tuning.

So if you’re feverishly building new stores, designing new store experiences, buying into cutting edge digital integrations, or betting the farm on new uses for your real-estate, wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to tell if what you’re trying is actually working? And a way to make it work better since getting these innovative, complex things right the first time isn’t going to happen?

This is the bottom line: these days in retail, nobody needs to invest in customer measurement. After all, there’s a perfectly good alternative that just takes a little bit longer.

It’s called natural selection. And the answers it gives are depressingly final.