Shift Retail Focus

As the marketplace shifts and the velocity and impact of changes disrupt the retail practices across all channels retailers must now shift their focus from an internalized focus to an external and extended collaborative focus in order to help them sense and respond to the changes. In addition, retailers must not only focus on sensing the changes early on in the market, they must also shift their focus from reaction to action and drive the market change through experimentation. The two practices of extended collaboration to sense the change and experimentation to react to and even drive change must then be combined with a culture change that encourages experimentation and exploring the leading edge. Retailers that are ‘good enough’ will struggle to survive while retailers that push the limits and are not afraid to fail in experiments will succeed and drive the market disruption.




This shift in focus will be difficult form many of the large retailers and will require investment and perseverance to succeed, however, there is really no choice in the matter, the large retailers must change or die. We have seen over the recent years large retailers struggling and failing in large part, I believe, because of their hesitancy to change the culture. The key to this round of market change and disruption is the velocity of change and the discontinuous spurts of change pushing the market disruption. This is is why it is so important for these large retailers to change their culture in order to drive the change in practices required to meet the demand. Rather than reducing spend and closing outlets as a result of lowered sales the retailers may need to close outlets but they should redouble the spend to change and recoup the sales lost.




This is something that I see with JC Penney, they have been pummelled by sales reductions after having tried new strategies and now they have changed their focus to spend on leaders to change their focus in reaction to the market changes. This is probably the best chance for JC Penney to turn around and survive with this change in leadership that brings with it a change in culture. This will only be confirmed though with some time. There are others that have changed leadership that have only continued with the legacy culture with new some new faces. This is basically a retailer experiment in real time that will provide proof of concept for meeting the demands of the new retail marketplace disruptions.




Amazon is still at the heart of disruption and they continuously demonstrate the reasons they remain the leader. Many of the major disruptions continue to be started with Amazon, such as Prime, or the acquisition of Whole Foods, have shown the focus and culture of experimentation demonstrated in real time. This culture of experimentation and collaboration must be encouraged and implemented with other retailers now in order to meet the disruption.