For NRF 2013 and we conducted surveys in multiple countries for our next release of consumer research.
Jon Stine, director of Cisco IBSG and Lisa Fretwell, senior director of Cisco IBSG will be presenting the results at NRF Big Idea session on Monday, January 14, 2013 at 9:15 – 10:00 a.m at Room 3D04, EXPO Hall, Level 3
Have been thinking about the retail implications of an early May article in the Wall Street Journal.
“Renting Prosperity” (by Daniel Gross, May 5) spoke to the growing trend of rental – and not just in the traditional housing or automotive markets. Numerous other rental business have emerged in recent years, from the Zipcar car-sharing plan to the Chegg.com college textbook service to the one million customers who have used Rent the Runway’s frock-and-accessory services.
The obvious implication for retail is all about new business models. A number of traditional brick-and-mortar players are now testing the waters. We’re aware of initiatives in which purveyors of hard goods are renting clothes washing machines by the load and high-end consumers of electronics are leasing home theatre set-ups and even iPads – along with monthly subscriptions, say, to Netflix.
But the lessons of the rental trend go deeper than simply a new business model.
There’s a lot of buzz in industry circles these days about the impact of “showrooming” on brick-and-mortar brands. Witness the excellent overview by Ann Zimmerman in the April 11 US edition of the Wall Street Journal,“Can Retailers Halt ‘Showrooming?’”
Ms. Zimmerman notes the anti-showrooming efforts of such retailers as Target and Walmart, and the challenge of meeting-and-beating pure play pricing and assortment breadth.
And, she also gets to the core of the issue: It’s not about competition between stores and pure play websites. It’s about competition between the websites of brick-and-mortar brands, and the websites of the pure plays.
We live in the era of Google, an era of web-based search, an era where just about any detail of just about anything can be found on the Internet. Studies of recent shopper behavior show a steady climb in the number of US shoppers who begin their purchase journey with online research. Nearly two-thirds of US adults do so regularly.
The Internet is the front door to all retail brands these days – not just the pure plays. It’s where shoppers are initially won or lost – and where store traffic is increasingly generated.
My colleague Bharat Popat and I just published a perspective on Cloud computing for retail that we think will help retail technologists cut through the cloud around Cloud.
Our hypothesis is that Cloud basically consists of custom combinations of four IT best practices:
Virtualization.
Network-centric enterprise and store ICT architectures.
The acquisition of services – ranging from enterprise applications to infrastructure to complete business processes.
The pursuit (and use) of new financial models.
All of which are in rapid adoption throughout developed world retailing (and enterprises in general.)
