Retail Renewal

The retail market is in a process of renewal as a result of the disruption brought about by the omni market change by consumers to the marketplace. This is a good thing and a necessary thing that drives the market forward to support consumer demands. This time though the renewal is in part driven by consumers through technology and collaboration and in part driven by consumer focused Internet retailers like Amazon that are themselves encouraging and experimenting with consumer changing demands. I believe though that this renewal cycle is different from previous cycles in that the renewal will be a continuous cycle of disruption and renewal in the market. This is the key theme coming through in this cycle of renewal and this is one of the key differences i this new cycle from previous market cycles.

During the market renew driven by eCommerce and essentially lead by Amazon there was a theme carried through the disruption and the market renewal; the consumer demands to simplify their shopping via the Internet and eCommerce. This theme carried retailers into the next generation of the marketplace to produce and omni channel shopping experience. This was comforting to the market players as well because it was a proven direction that they could copy to produce results. The challenge to this cycle in the marketplace is that there is no common theme that carries through each example of disruption and renewal.

There is no visible common theme that can be reproduced for success, the success of one retailer cannot simply be reproduced by others. There are two key differences in the current cycle of disruption:


There is no common thread of success in the market. At odds with previous cycles of market disruption and change; the success from one cannot be copied by another. One retailer thrives and grows because of the strength of their brick and mortar outlets while another succeeds because of their online presence.


The disruption comes in a discontinuous cycle that does not give the market a chance to really settle. This presents a struggle to maintain the pace of the change and also does not allow for the response to be duplicated for across the market. Almost as soon as a disrupting force is recognized and addressed the next disruption is sweeping the market

This cycle of disruption is driven by consumers rather than by some retailer, as in the past and this is a very important difference in this disruption cycle. The last major disruption to the market in my opinion was the explosion of Amazon on the market. This disruption, like previous disruptions, was driven by a retailer with a vision that was embraced by consumers. This disruption, also like previous disruptions, spread through the market quickly with the concept, in this case the drive for the lowest price combined with ease of purchase and vast selection, was accepted and extended by other retailers until it seems to be embedded in the market DNA. This disruption is also in many ways at the root of the current disruption.

This current disruption started with the concept and the drive for the selection, price and ease of shopping. In the beginning, consumers' focus on low price was supported and driven by the opportunity of Internet retailers to cut prices. This was the result of retailers reacting to consumers and these same retailers attempting to gain market share. This drive from Internet retailers was borne of the drive to succeed and the ability of these new Internet retailers to take advantage of the market and cut costs dramatically because of their reduced overhead. Now this lowest price concept and drive has become the foundation of the retail market in many ways has also in many ways now bitten the creator of the concept.

Now the combination of technology and the growing ability of the consumer to direct and even change their shopping is also disrupting the market in a series of discontinuous changes that are driven by the imagination and the demands of the consumer. Now this new renewal is all about the consumer ability redirect and direct their shopping in ways that support their individual lifestyles along with their desire to spend less and get more in return. This new discontinuos disruption cycle also is creating a model for continuous renewal with technology providing the means and consumer lifestyle demands providing the direction.



This new market driven by continuous disruption requires each participant in the market to sense and respond to the disruption in a manner that is based on their own imagination and capabilities. This is the change that is impacting the market in the greatest manner because in previous cycles there was always time to confirm the most effective response and then this response would be reproduced by others. Now when the most effective response for a particular retailer is identified the market has already entered the next disruption cycle which changes the success factors. Retailers must change their culture then in order to succeed in this discontinuous disruption cycle.

Consumer Collaborative Commerce

We are entering into a new age of commerce that is driven by consumer experimentation with shopping and purchasing practices driven by their embrace of technology (Internet, social, mobile and network) along with a drive to support their lifestyle through experimentation with technology.  The experimentation with technology is driving the retail impact and requires a collaborative practice and reaction from retailers to support the quickly changing demands and consumer practices. Consumers are really not sure how technology can be used to support their lifestyle needs and this leads to a trial and error process that can best be described as a continuous improvement process that has been adopted by consumers to develop and change shopping and purchasing practices to meet their lifestyle demands.  This process leads to a highly disruptive retail environment that requires retailers to collaborate not only with their extended supply chain partners but also with consumers to develop the methods to support the consumer demands.

Most consumers are open to social interaction and especially the millennials and this is driving this surge in consumer collaborative commerce.  Consumers are going to interact with other consumers and they are also going to use the technology and the tools available to support their shopping.  Retailers need to recognize, and embrace, this simple fact in order to succeed. Consumers will collaborate with all partners and the large legacy retailers are fooling themselves if they think that they can control consumer interaction in shopping and purchasing.  Consumers have demonstrated over and over that they will utilize collaboration and technology tools to overcome limitations in their shopping and purchasing capabilities that are either planned or inadvertently enacted by retailers.

The only way that retailers can successfully react to these consumer changes and demands is to get ahead of the curve through increased collaboration with consumers.  This increased collaboration is the means to develop relationships with consumers in the retail omni market and retailers must embrace this practice in order to survive.  There really is no other way to look at the current retail marketplace and the sooner retailers themselves understand and embrace this new reality, the sooner these retailers will be able to sense and respond to the changing demands.  The large legacy retailers have systematically eliminated the direct consumer interaction through their drive in cost reductions and reductions in sales staff developing the relationships with consumers. This must now be re-learned by these same retailers and most importantly learned to support in the virtual retail marketplace that is now so important to consumers.

The genius of Amazon was the recognition of the importance of the consumer collaborative relationship and their focus on developing this relationship.  This focus on developing the relationship has paid off dramatically now as the retail marketplace has evolved and even been driven by experimentation from both consumers and Amazon.  The large legacy retailers now must recognize their deficit in consumer collaborative commerce and focus on the development of these capabilities. Consumers will continue to experiment and push the limits of technology and collaborative shopping and purchasing while Amazon continues to experiment as well with new capabilities.  There is no time left for the large legacy retailers to delay their embrace in these capabilities, they must also embrace collaborative commerce with consumers and this means dramatic changes in the culture and the retail framework.

Retail Speed of Delivery

Consumers in the retail omni market now are focused on changing lifestyles and how the retail marketplace can meet the demands of their changing demands to meet their lifestyles.  It’s not necessarily that the consumer lifestyle is changing so dramatically or even so quickly, consumers are refining and changing how they meet their lifestyle demands. The focus on in the retail omni market requires a focus on speed of delivery in order to the changing consumer demands.  This means that speed of delivery in the retail market must be a focus of retailers in order to maintain their place in consumer shopping and purchasing. This retail omni market provides a level of choice to consumers that has not been available to consumers in the past and now consumers are really focused on taking advantage of these choices.

This is interesting because consumers have come to a place in their shopping and purchasing practices that focuses on shopping and purchasing capabilities that meet their lifestyle rather than focus on product availability.  Consumers and their interaction with the retail market has reached the point where the product and price priorities have leveled and the differentiating factor now is the ease of shopping and purchasing. Consumers have reached the point where price and availability are expected to be comparable across the marketplace and they now focus on the selection and delivery to meet the consumer needs and demands.  

This change in consumer focus is bringing a new level of change for retailers that is the focus now and driving the disruption in the marketplace.  Unfortunately for retailers, consumers are using the technology available to focus on their priorities which is bringing this new level of disruption to the market.  Retailers must realize that the cycle of change is going to remain and only the focus of the change will shift. Consumers are a fickle bunch and they have embraced the new fact of the retail marketplace that the technology available encourages consumers to put things together in new ways to support changing needs and demands.  

Retail sales outside of the necessities of food and medicine are based on relationships and opportunities and consumers are now in the position to put technology capabilities togethers in ways that can dramatically increase the opportunities, both timing and types of opportunities. This means that retailers must increase their level of flexibility with process process and functionality to meet the changing consumer demands in addition to increasing the level of consumer engagement and collaboration in order to build the relationships that allow retailers to identify the changing demands.  

Retail functionality has reached a point where flexibility is the focus and the framework that many of the larger retailers have implemented to support the flexibility has also reached a point where is can swiftly react to market demands.  The requirement now for retailers is the identification and reaction time to the shopping and purchasing demands. You can see that the recent focus has been on shopping and purchasing capabilities and that price and availability is now the price of admission.  Rather than focusing on the capability retailers must now focus on how they identify the changing demands because this ‘how’ will allow these retailers to identify and react to the future market disruptions.

What Is Retail Omni Market?

It is important to understand the definition of retail omni market and it is even more important to understand that the retail omni market is a concept and a practice and a direction rather a product or an endpoint.  This is much different than the multi channel or omni channel practice because these terms describe an operational practice that describes the method of product sale. Retail omni channel crosses over the operational sales methods and brings to together the act of shopping and purchasing in a social manner to meet the lifestyle demands of the consumer.  Consumers have always treated retail as a social experience where the experience of interaction and engagement is almost as important as the act of purchasing. This initial iteration of the retail omni market is bringing dramatic change to the retail experience that will further impact the physical properties, such as malls and brick and mortar stores.

Retail omni channel supports consumer collaboration and engagement to produce a retail personal experience rather than a simple transactional engagement of the purchase.  Consumers are social animals that are drawn to the persona interaction. There are many tools that have progressed to the point where they can easily support the virtual social interaction and the ingredient that allowed the omni market to really come together and solidify is the growth of the millennial generation in the retail market place.  Millennials brought two things to the market to push towards the omni market concept;

1. Comfort with technology and the virtual capabilities of social networks.  Millennials bring to the table a basic acceptance in the technology and more importantly a comfort in the technology.  In other words technology comes as second nature to millennials and they don’t hesitate to use technology to enhance their lifestyles.
2. Curiosity and the drive to experiment encourages them to push boundaries and move past the accepted practices to enhance and improve their experiences.  These are the people that experiment with new technology and embrace new technologies as second nature and have a drive to improve and enhance their experience through technology.

These are practices and reasons why the retail omni market concept has come together into a reality and these are also the reasons why the omni market concept will have such a large impact on the market place.  This concept requires a change in culture of the large legacy retailers to focus on implementing flexibility to allow them to increase consumer collaboration and engagement. This consumer engagement is the factor that will drive success for the retailers going forward.  This consumer engagement must really replace low price as the critical success factor in retail. This change in the critical success factor is the reason why the culture must change from a culture of control to a culture of collaboration.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience? Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas. How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Retail Omni Market

Consumers are changing the retail marketplace with demands to meet their lifestyle requirements and the growth of millennials in the market has increased the velocity of this change.  There is no longer a separation in the usage between the channels and the millennials have been the key force in driving these changes.  The demands and the consumer capabilities to utilize technology supports these demands as a retail omni market that consumers use to enhance shopping and purchasing in a manner that fits in with their changing lifestyles.  Millennials have added the push to greater virtual interactions as a result of their comfort in technology and the consumer market is embracing these changes as a means to support the changes in their lifestyle.

This retail omni market will drive significant disruption into the legacy retailers as they scramble to define and strategy and change their culture to support the demands of the omni market.  This requires a change in the view of the technology and the utilization including significant change to support increased communications and collaboration not only between retailers and consumers but also between retailers, consumers and the extended supply chain partners.  This change requires a control tower mechanism to coordinate and sort the communication demands of this retail omni market to ensure efficient engagement across the participants.  

This also requires a control tower mechanism to control and direct data requirements to support the communication demands.  There are way too many moving parts now in the retail repertoire that require monitoring and direction to provide value and these types of pieces and parts is only going to increase as the retail omni market changes and grows.  The retailers success in this omni market will hinge on their ability to embrace new technologies, partners and capabilities in the same breakneck pace that consumers are embracing them.  This cannot hope to be managed in a command and control environment, it requires and adaptive collaboration environment with a huge dose of big data collection and analysis to coordinate and direct.  

The retail omni market is the coming together of the virtual and the physical market in a manner that supports the continuously changing consumer lifestyle demands in an ever increasing velocity.  This is Moore’s law in the retail market and just as the improvements in transistor capabilities doubled every two years, in the case of the retail omni market the rate of consumer demands to meet the changing lifestyles seems to double at least every two years.  This requires a flexible and robust foundation to integrate and guide change that is best supported through a control tower strategy bringing together technology and data to provide guidance.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Mobile Business Continuity

Mobile technology integration and consumer collaboration has become a very large piece of the retail toolset and because of this increase in utilization and importance it is very important for retailers to develop a robust business continuity plan to recover in the event of an event that compromises these capabilities.  It is only a matter of time before an event impacts the access or the historical archives developed by the mobile business practices and retailers must be prepared for the loss of functionality, loss of data and recovery requirements.  The retailer must include in their business continuity planning and reviews a critical section for recovery of the mobile business practices, even though in many cases these processes are support via cloud based technology.  

In most cases I believe that mobile technology is utilized as a portal or interface to the corporate data, in other words the mobile technology provides access to business processes supported behind the retailers firewall.  However I also believe that more and more retailers utilize cloud technologies and data stores to support the mobile and eCommerce solutions, especially as it related to social networking and interaction with the consumer.  These are the areas of concern and must be reviewed on a regular basis to identify potential points of failure and recovery procedures.  These recovery procedures become much more complex because of the interaction with external partners and service providers.  

Supply chain partners and service provider collaboration and especially the mobile collaboration activities must also be evaluated for points of failures and business recovery procedures.  The recovery procedures and timeframes become much more complicated as the technology platforms and the number of partners increase because of the complexity inherent in the interactions and dependencies on business processes with partners.  The interaction between partners and the expectation of data and process availability will provide the greatest risk to any partner business continuity and these interactions and dependencies must be reviewed on a regular basis to confirm recovery procedures.

The retail marketplace is a fast paced environment with a very high rate of change across many platforms and partners.  This environment increases the complexity of the business relationships and also the complexity of the business continuity planning and implementation.  It is very easy in this type of environment for retailers to overlook the need to account for the business continuity requirements as they are reacting to the consumer’s changing demands.  This is the most important reason though to account for business continuity planning because when there is an event that requires quick response to recover the retailer cannot afford to lose hours or days in recovery, especially during a busy holiday season.   

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Omni Channel Inventory Management

Large retailers in the midst of reacting to the marketplace disruption must reevaluate their business process model and develop an omni channel inventory management strategy that can react to the disruptions.  The market changes and velocity of these changes require a strategy that is robust and flexible to support the velocity of change.  This requires a strategy that focuses on the base business process model and not on current practices and legacy requirements.  The large legacy retailers must break from the multi channel strategy to a true omni channel inventory management strategy that accounts for the business process objectives and requirements rather.  The omni channel strategy is based on a flexible business process model that focuses on process function and not on channel.

The multi channel inventory management strategy was in reality a transitional strategy that provided a bridge between the separation of channels and the true omni channel strategy.  This was not understood initially and only became clear with the continued change and the quickening disruption in the market that requires another view of the requirements based on a flexible business model based on process and not on legacy capabilities.  The multi channel strategy supported a transition inventory strategy that straddled the transition of channels to the omni channel model.  The omni channel model must now be based on business process as demanded by consumer practices rather than existing retailer capabilities.

Consumers have created an omni channel marketplace without the support or participation of the large legacy retailers and this became abundantly evident over the last year when the shift to online purchase and delivery reached essentially the same level as the brick and mortar sales.  The impact to the retail marketplace reached a critical mass at that point and is driving change at a dramatic velocity on the large legacy retailers.  Retailers have been struggling to react to the changing demands including re-inventing the legacy retail experience.  The challenge for retailers though is how to retrofit legacy processes to support the changing consumer demands.

This challenge requires a break from the past and a focus on the future to enable the retailer to efficiently sense and respond to changing consumer demands.  In order to meet the challenge retailers must focus on process demands and not to current capabilities.  Consumers have used technology to take control of their shopping and purchasing processes to meet their lifestyle requirements and retailer must recognize that they can no longer control how or when consumers shop and purchase.  This is a very disrupting change to the large legacy retailers because it wrests control from the retailer.  This change requires that retailers develop an omni channel inventory management strategy that focuses on process and not control.  This strategy must support processes that are at odds with the current retailer culture and this is very difficult and requires stamina and focus to change.

Retail Inventory Disruption

The retail marketplace disruption is driving the disruption in retail inventory management requirements to support the new marketplace.  My concern is that retailers have focused on the disruption to the retail store and reduction in traffic to the detriment of the inventory management changes necessary to support the retail marketplace.  Retailers should be reviewing their retail business processes to identify changes required of the inventory management process as a means to address the marketplace disruption.  Retailers only focused on the impact to brick and mortar store real estate are missing a potential root cause of the disruption itself which is the change in consumer shopping and purchasing practices. This change in consumer shopping and purchasing impacts the retailers in many ways and the retailer must understand how to address the changes in the most cost effective manner and not simply by divesting real estate holdings.

The large national retailers  are focused on the impact of reduced store traffic while the sales have transferred to eCommerce purchases.  This attitude is only natural and the result seems to be a focus on reductions in the retail store real estate holdings when in reality these retailers cannot afford to simply focus on cost reductions and divesting store real estate.  These retailers must recognize the resulting impact on the inventory support requirements and determine how to react to these changes to the inventory demand requirements first.  In my opinion the definition of the new inventory strategy should be completed prior to determining next steps in the store real estate requirements.

Where this change to the inventory strategy will truly impact the retailer and the future requirements of store real estate is defining how the inventory strategy will address the changes in consumer shopping and purchasing.  In my opinion the retail inventory strategy will, and should, drive the real estate decision.  I see the inventory strategy as a key starting point for defining how retailers will increase their flexibility to support the changing consumer shopping and purchasing demands.  The retail inventory disruption should drive a simplification and standardization of inventory management practices across all channels and then determine how to ensure that inventory is distributed throughout the retail network to most efficiently support the consumer shopping and purchasing demands.  

The retail strategy is the key to the large retailer strategy to meet the disruption in the consumer sales and purchasing practices. Retailers must take the long view in the market disruption and to me this means addressing the disruption through an inventory strategy that views store real estate as a distinct market advantage to allow retailers to move inventory closer to the consumer.  

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Omni Channel Service Requirements

Retailers must quickly and efficiently expand services in both shopping and purchase delivery and the only way they can effectively and efficiently hope to execute on these demands is to break down the silos and collaborate across customers, internal marketing and operations, and the extended supply chain including the transportation partners.  Retailers must quickly act to build this collaborative network in order to turn around the slippage in sales across channels.  Consumers have already moved to implement their own omni channel practices through the technology and network capabilities.  This collaborative strategy must be implemented in order for the retailer to support the consumer practices, retailers can no longer direct and control consumer retail shopping and purchasing and if these retailers continue to demand that consumers accept their control the consumer will simply walk away.

Consumers have too many choices now in all of their interactions and these choices are being encouraged by the simplicity of online purchasing combined with improved mobile technology and wireless networks.  Large retailers have been slow to react to these demands I think because they have believed in their practices and control.  These retailers incorporated multichannel retail capabilities however they never implemented omni channel capabilities, the multi channel capabilities seem to have been viewed has almost a necessary evil because the brick and mortar outlet was the key channel. Omni channel capabilities seem to have been focused on how they could be incorporated to support the retail brick and mortar outlet.  

I think the issue is a cultural issue in the large retailers that causes a hesitancy to collaborate across the channels and a with consumers.  I think that the large retailer focus is on internally developed strategies based on standard industry practices and their accepted norms.  The problem with this culture is that consumers are now collaborating with each other and Amazon is disrupting the norms of all standard industry practices.  Large legacy retailers are attempting to add capabilities that fit into their culturally accepted practices and Amazon is disrupting these industry practices at the same time.

Retail has now reached a turning point and consumers are collaborating with retailers such as Amazon to support their shopping and purchasing to create a true omni channel experience.  Large legacy retailers have been caught in their culture and as a result have not recognized the signs that were clear for years.  These retailers now must open up and collaborate across the entire extended marketplace to obtain information and most importantly to act on the information in a manner that is not influenced by pre-conceived industry practices.  

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Retail Supply Chain Practices

The retail supply chain must change the way in which they support the business to improve flexibility and most importantly support the changes in the ways that consumers interact with retailers through omni channel shopping and purchasing.  Just as the retail business must change to support frictionless shopping and purchasing across all channels to meet the changing demands of consumers, the retail supply chain must change in order to support the inventory replenishment and delivery across cycles.  The impact of these demands on the retail supply chain require a flexibility in communication, capabilities and expanded collaboration across the extended supply chain.  The key to meeting the demands is developing robust flexibility into the supply chain framework to react and support changes.

The good news is that the supply chain has been forced to react to pressures and changes to the practices over the years from a combination of changing manufacturing demands, natural disaster and cost pressures so the supply chain is in a position to provide leadership and direction to retailers.  The supply chain industry has spent years reacting to continuous disruption and these disruptions and practices to sense and respond to changing demands can provide the necessary framework for the large legacy retailers to support the frictionless omni channel retail requirements.  

Retailers must first change their supply chain practices to conform with a new omni channel market framework that supports a single inventory position across channels that provides a basis to support fluid movement of inventory across channels.  These practices require a change for many retailers in their operational practices as well.  To be more specific as an example, the retailers must extend their supply chain practices across all channels to support pick, pack and ship operations to customers, between stores and between warehouse in any direction.  This brings an increased demand across the entire supply chain for labor, transportation, inventory control and accuracy including expansion to inventory and sales forecasting and planning.  

These changes are focused mainly on the when and less on the actual functionality and expands the retail supply practices directly to the retail store shelf.  The supply chain function does not change, in other words product will be picked and packed, however these functions will be performed at the store as well as in a specialized distribution center.  The results of these expansions in supply chain practices are an increased focus on inventory management along with an expansion of labor in the and capabilities across the omni channel marketplace.

These changes in retail supply chain practices will bring increased cost management pressures to address the labor expansion in the retail stores.  Much of the expansion can be supported by repurposing labor and changing job roles and responsibilities.  These will require analysis and measurements through labor standards management which is again an expansion of supply chain practices across the omni channel outlets.  The challenge to the retail supply chain is to revise the view and activities in retail store outlets to align standard supply chain practices to all retail channel outlets.  

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Omnichannel Demand Management

The omnichannel retail marketplace is driven by discontinuous consumer demand across all channels and with this brings difficulties in managing the demand in an individual channel.  This affects the inventory demand management and as a result the inventory placement across channels because of the changes in demand across channels.  These demands require the retailer to modify their forecasts and inventory management to support this discontinuous change model across channels. The old adage in this model is true, ‘the only thing constant is change’  and retailers must implement methods to support this change model.  Just as with forecast planning, demand management must change in order to adjust to the changing demand of the omnichannel market.

The omnichannel market is only going to expand from consumer cross channel shopping and purchasing and this will only increase the pressure on demand management and forecasting.  Demand management procedures must change just as the forecasting side of the equation must change to review and replan in shorter cycles in order to adjust as necessary as a result of the discontinuous consumer demand by channels.  Omnichannel retailers must be prepared and plan to adjust and move inventory across locations based on consumer demand cycles across locations and channels.  The forecasting and demand changes are resulting in the need to reevaluate the inventory management practices in order to support the changes driven by the omnichannel marketplace.

These changes in consumer demand radiate throughout the marketplace to disrupt retail practices.  This cycle of discontinuous change will only continue and in fact speed up as consumers continue to mash new capabilities to meet their changing lifestyles.  These changing demands require that retailers implement procedures to increase collaboration and flexibility in order to be able to support the level and velocity of change.  This means dramatic changes to the retailers procedures and methods of demand management and sales tracking.  This requires that retailers flatten their demand management, forecast planning and sales delivery in order to meet these demands.  These requirements will drive cultural changes for retailers as well because it requires elimination of silos in their forecasting, demand and inventory management.

Consumers are flattening their shopping and purchasing to eliminate the silos between retail channels and retailers must follow suit in order to meet the consumer demands.  This means that omnichannel retailers must support purchasing practices that demand omnichannel delivery to the consumer from every channel.  This means that omnichannel retailers must support stringent delivery service levels to a consumer selected address across all channels.  Large omnichannel retailers must improve their delivery service level to meet the same service levels as Amazon in order to survive.  Wal Mart has recognized this and has been changing practices, procedures and even their culture to meet these changing demands.  Other large omnichannel retailers must follow in order to survive.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Collaboration Trial And Error

Trial and error is a key factor in developing a collaborative relationships and especially in developing that relationship between consumer and retailer.  Consumers are a fickle group with a short attention span and this drives a level and velocity of change in interaction that is breathtaking and also extremely intimidating for the retailer.  Many of the larger retailers are struggling with the concept and as a result are attempting to buy into the consumer collaboration through acquisition of tools.  While it is important to use the appropriate tools in collaborative efforts it is also probably more important to use and interact with the tools to engage the consumer and this is the part that requires active participation by the retailer.  The difficulty is that there is no guidebook on what works for consumers so there is a great deal of trial and error involved in the process that can make the retailer uneasy.

The majority of retailers and especially the larger retailers are not known for their experimentation in new technologies or retail practices.  These retailers are followers that wait for the leaders to vet new technologies and practices before embracing and implementing themselves.  This practice has been very productive for retailers in the past and this practice is also driving the current strategy for the larger retailers in acquisition of new technologies and tools.  In other words, these large retailers are embracing the new technology through acquisition after this technology has been vetted by the marketplace.  This strategy is a very good way to bootstrap their capabilities to meet the demands of the marketplace.  However, without a paired new human practice to collaborate with consumers and experiment through trial and error these technology capabilities will only allow these retailers to remain two steps behind demands of the marketplace.

Retailers must pair the technology capabilities with human practices to collaboration and engage consumers direction in order to discover and implement new practices to support consumer demands.  This pairing requires a long term commitment to change their culture to interact and collaborate with with consumers along and with this a commitment to encourage experimentation and an acceptance for these experiments to fail.  This requires a long term commitment from leadership to accept and even encourage failure in experimentation supporting consumer demands.

These large retailers must change their practices from trend followers to trend leaders in order to survive in the marketplace.  The velocity of change driven by consumer curiosity and experimentation will not allow for retailers to wait for practices and methods to become engrained in the marketplace because the new velocity of change does not generally support standard practices very well.  The new standard practice is change and this change requires a method of trial and error to experiment with the changing consumer demands.  This is the driving factor of the market disruption and retailers must embrace and change in order to survive.  

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Social Commerce Management

 

The social commerce marketplace must be actively managed, and supported by each of the professional participants in the relationships.  This can be very difficult due to the wide cross section of participants and their interest in managing and supporting the relationship.  The retailer owns and must actively manage their interrelated social commerce marketplace across all partners because the retail owner has the greatest the greatest benefits and as a result the greatest investment riding on the success of the marketplace.  The retail owner of their social commerce marketplace must spend the time and effort to continuously and actively manage the interactions and changes demanded by the marketplace participants.

The retail owner of the marketplace has the greatest interest in the success and as a result must focus the greatest effort and attention to the marketplace to ensure that it remains fresh and interesting to the participants.  The social network participants and interactions are only related and a part of the market because of the customer interest and this can change on the whim of customer interest.  As a result, the retailer must implement a robust organization that interacts with participants and monitors all social commerce marketplaces and social networking trends along with third party shopping and purchasing tools.  There are so many interactions and tools in this social commerce world that it requires a full time focus of savey support teams to monitor and react to the changes in the market and customer demands.

Retailers can acquire these skills by acquiring start-up eCommerce companies such as is being done by Wal Mart or they can acquire these skills through recruiting talent and building the organization internally.  Each of these methods have their own challenges and benefits, chief among the challenges is overcoming legacy culture that was developed over the years.  Acquisition of capabilities is easy by comparison to the challenge of changing the culture in a large organization.  Leadership must embrace and drive the culture change in addition to the changes to succeed in the social commerce marketplace.  You cannot simply acquire the capabilities and then expect to succeed, leadership must focus and nurture the changes to the culture that are required for social commerce practices and methods to take root and gain the ability to maintain the culture and the growth in the social commerce marketplace.

Social commerce and the social commerce marketplace are focused on the rate of change and the speed to deliver in order to be successful and the most important aspect is the long term focus and support of leadership to encourage the change in culture required to recognize and support the change.  Leadership must take a long term and very patient view that will require a great deal of investment to take root and organically grow and support the marketplace.  This cannot simply be purchased, it must be grown internally.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Social Commerce New Reality

Social commerce shopping and purchasing has created a new retail reality and that new reality is the wave of change that now is impacting the retail marketplace and especially legacy retailers that are struggling to adjust to the changes in the market.  Social commerce impact on this marketplace is not however limited to the sales and shopping services offered by retailers the most significant and therefore making the greatest impact changes are the consumer cultural changes that are impacting the market place.  These cultural changes are the most significant impact and also the most significant to try to implement by retailers and because of this, these cultural changes are also having the greatest impact on the retail marketplace.  

Retailers struggle to implement cultural changes comes down to a generational struggle within the organization.  Millennials growth in the marketplace has increased their impact in the shopping and purchasing habits and these changes have been quickly embraced by other consumers because they recognize the value of these changes to their lifestyles.  Retailer leadership however has been delayed in recognizing the required changes to their culture and as a result have been reluctant to change.  I think this is in large part because changes to purchasing and shopping has never before required changes to retail culture.  I can understand a leadership perspective that is reluctant to culture change because internal culture never before required dramatic change as a result in changing shopping patterns.

In fairness this cultural change is not a sudden change, it has really been building now for years starting with the expansion of Facebook and other social networks and their acceptance and use by consumers.  Retailers looked at these tools as marketing and customer relationship outlets and while they incorporated the usage of these tools in their practice most of these retailers left them as a segment of their marketing tools.  They never really maintained a focus or further integration plan for these tools to their other practices.  However during this same time consumers continued to expand their use of these tools, along with additional social networking tools to build relationships and share with other consumers.

The tipping point however came with the growth of millennials in the market.  Millennials are immersed in technology and they are using this comfort in technology, along with their comfort in social media and networking, to build their own shopping reality based on interactions and collaboration with other consumers and retailers as the retailers recognize and implement these changes.  Retailers are now forced to recognize and embrace these cultural changes in order to support this new consumer reality.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Social Commerce Continued Impact

The impact of social commerce continues and continues to grow in the retail marketplace.  Initially this caught retailers by surprise it seems when sales in retail stores initially were impacted and now the market is in a place where the brick and mortar sales while perhaps somewhat stabilizing are still very soft.  It's a bit like watching a slow motion train wreck as we continue with declines in brick and mortar stores, decline in sales at malls and mall closings while increases in online sales remain strong.  Legacy retailers are now scrambling to adjust to this changing marketplace and my suspicion is that their activities will not address the underlying cause which is the millennials reached a level of participation and size that is impacting the marketplace in a dramatic way.

Legacy retailers cannot adjust their omni channel structure or makeup to resolve these issues buffeting the marketplace.  They must re-make themselves by changing their cultures and embracing the social commerce and social structure that support social commerce.  Consumers are changing the way they shop and this in turn is changing the way they purchase.  Retailers cannot simply incorporate the eCommerce technology and expect to be successful.  The continued impact of social commerce is the process and continuing change to consumer shopping and purchasing habits.  These changes have become a process driven by the changing demands and practices of consumers.  

These changing demands are only going to increase in velocity based on changing and evolving consumer shopping and purchasing practices.  Retailers can no longer rest after changing, they must continuously change and evolve their culture in order to support the consumer demands.  Basically it is not enough to implement a new technology because these new technologies require the interaction and coordination of social practices.  Retailers must understand and then embrace this requirement to change and then they must get to the difficult part of changing their culture.  A culture cannot be changed without the support and encouragement of leadership and this must be accepted as a long term requirement.

The interesting point regarding this continued impact is that I believe that while the leadership of legacy retailers may not have accepted this new reality, the culture of these retailers are in a turmoil that is resulting in the growth of millennials in the job market.  Legacy retailer leadership must open up and accept these changes in culture in order to survive.  These leaders do not need to embrace the changes, they must simply accept these changes and requirements to allow the culture to begin the change.  These leaders can embrace the change at a later time when the results and benefits are realized.  

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Continuous Improvement For Customers

It is much more difficult to encourage and then maintain participation in a collaborative partnership with the customers of the partner businesses.  This is where the continuous monitoring and improvement program enters into the equation to provide a framework to generate the continued interest and participation of the customers in the collaborative partnership.  Customers require encouragement and clear demonstration and then delivery of benefits to their participation in the collaborative partnership.  Since there is no formal agreement or contract with customers to participate in your collaborative partnership your customers require a continuous stream of interaction and demonstrated benefits that will result from their participation in the partnership.    

A continuous stream of interaction can be very difficult at first and requires dedication and stamina to produce content that both attracts customers and also encourages interaction and contribution from customers.  The content entirely depends on your customer base however you must not make assumptions on your customer base and interests because this will surely either miss a the mark on interest or overlook a segment of your customer and most likely it will cause both issues.  Interaction with your customers will allow you to learn from them as well as sell to them.  In many ways this is the basis and foundation for collaboration; the interaction and learning from each other that allows and encourages both sides to develop a relationship.

Collaboration with your customer is not just producing and maintaining a web site and it is not just sending broadcast email messages to your customers.  Collaboration is interaction and communication between yourself and your customers, it is a relationship a great deal beyond the one way broadcast of information or encouraging sales in multiple channels.  Collaboration with your customers is difficult because you must determine how to interact with your customers and different customers are comfortable with different types of interaction.  Collaboration requires a range of communication and interaction to meet the different types demanded by customers.  There is no set method of developing the collaboration relationship and that is why the continuous improvement process of plan, do, check, act is so important to developing and maintaining the customer collaborative relationship.

Continuous improvement methods provide a very flexible engine to developing and maintaining the customer relationship and provides a basis for maintaining the relationship.  This can be challenging at first because of a lack of participation from the customer and will require frequent changes in order to tune the model to align with your customer demands and comfort in communication.  Your customers will also be adjusting and changing their preconceptions on interactions and reactions to your collaboration trials so what may not work today may be a perfect fit later in the relationship as it grows and matures.  This requires constant maintenance and review in order to maintain the customer interest and this must be taken into account.  This is a long term investment that may not produce great results in the short term and you must take this into account.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?