How To Use Retail’s Past, Present & Future To Keep Ahead of The Competition

Evolve or die. That is the lesson that I got out of the conversation with our EVP, Michael Morin. As a retail veteran, Michael experienced many of the changes in marketing and technology first hand, and shares a unique perspective and insights.

The past: Technology
The prime factor that drives retail marketing change is undoubtedly new technology and the significantly reduced costs involved in acquiring it now. Michael recalls that 15-20 years ago the only organizations that could do predictive analytics were the department stores with enormous budgets and bulky computers. Fast forward to today, and all those computations can be done from a laptop. The reduced cost of technology allows us to apply analytics to smaller clients and still derive the same benefit.

The Present: The importance of trying new things
It is very easy to keep doing the same thing, because you are familiar with the process and know what to expect. We find comfort in success. However, we need to continue to innovate and try different things. That recognition is a mark of a good practitioner. At the end of the day if you don’t figure out new and better ways to do things, your competitor will, and you will lose business to them.

The Future: Social media hand raisers.
Michael sees the future of predictive analytics in continuing to identify hand raisers through different channels. With social media hitting mainstream, we are seeing a lot of people hand raise on those channels, telling anyone who will listen exactly what they want. For our furniture retailers, we see people talking about needing furniture, planning to move or having a problem that could be solved. The next step for retailers is integrating info scraped from social media into databases and predictive analytics.