Retail Renewal

Spring brings a sense of renewal and the current disrupting forces in the retail marketplace should be viewed as a type of retail spring renewal. Rather than a focus on cutting and reducing expense as a reaction to this disruption retailers should be looking at a renewal of the marketplace into an image and ability to efficiently and effectively support the changing demands of the consumer lifestyle in shopping and purchasing demands. Renewal provides an image of positive change and improvement to deliver on the imagination of the marketplace and this image is important to foster and encourage as opposed disruption that brings the image of cuts and reductions to address a downturn is sales. It is important to view and engage as an opportunity to grow rather than a requirement to cut and wait for some magical upturn in sales to appear.




There is a wide variety of purchasing capabilities that can be utilized to support the consumer lifestyle that have been developed over the years and there does not seem to be a limiting factor from the purchase capabilities. The limiting factor seems to be the transparency and combinations of shopping and purchasing and delivery capabilities available to the consumer from all channels in a true omni market view. This is where the retail disruption, or renewal, is focused and this is the key challenge to the larger retailers. These large retailers must overcome their natural tendency to fall back into the reaction methods from the past. They must overcome their reaction to reduce costs when faced with a downturn and must instead focus on the renew and an analysis to determine the reason for the downturn and then how to react to the downturn to recover the sales. This reaction spells the difference between success and failure in this new retail marketplace.




I saw a report that for the first time online sales have surpassed in store, brick and mortar, sales. This would seem to add weight to the retail marketplace disruption that should be driving renewal activities in the larger retailers. This news should be a little intimidating to retailers because it confirms the forecasts and the direction that has been assumed by many for a while. You could see the coming changes with the large players working to blur the lines between channels to support the omnimarket capabilities that are now coming together. You could also see the coming changes with the extended supply chain service offerings and especially in the drive to simplify the delivery based on the consumer lifestyle.




I see the differences coming together now in many ways and one of the ways is manner in which Amazon is experimenting with omnimarket retail. Amazon is playing their brand across channels and retail market segments to bring a shopping and purchasing experience that focuses on meeting consumer needs across product commodity. This is important and the only other american retailer with a similar type of market coverage would be Walmart and Walmart has been focused on growth in omnimarket to meet the Amazon challenge.