Dynamic pricing has come up quite a bit lately, driven in part by interest into whether the practice was used extensively during the holiday season, and a continued interest in whether it will be a big deal in 2016.
My take: at least half the hype around dynamic pricing comes from a misplaced definition of what dynamic pricing actually is.
So apparently I have a thing I do. I didn’t do it consciously, but I guess I have done it regularly: to declare the theme of the year in retail. I went back and looked at all of the articles I’ve written, and this trend started in 2009, when I declared it “the year of the customer”. Here are the rest of the years.
I got my start in the software world through supply chain software, specifically supply chain execution management. And quickly found myself at ground zero of Walmart’s RFID mandate. As the entire technology industry groped around, trying to figure out how to really implement RFID in the supply chain, it quickly became clear that there was a huge gap between the constant pinging signals coming from RFID tags, and the execution systems that needed to ultimately capture the meaning of those signals.
Ever since RSR’s webinar on the NRF Big Show, one topic keeps cropping up over and over: self service in stores. To talk about this topic in any meaningful way, you first need to keep in mind that the need for self service in stores differs significantly by retail vertical. No one expects (or truly, wants) an employee following them around while filling a grocery basket, but they very much expect employee assistance when shopping for high end clothing, to put it in extreme terms. Will self service go away for convenience shopping in stores? Probably not. Will it invade high-end experiences? Probably not. But in between is a whole lot of ground.
In the book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras spoke about the “genius of AND”. The basic idea is that companies who define their capabilities or their markets as exclusionary choices are limiting themselves. The real power comes when companies embrace the contradiction inherent in what otherwise might be two opposing concepts.
So how did retail do in 2015? Here are my top take-aways for the year.
In the vendor world, there is a perennial problem: retailers don’t want to go on the record as owning or in any way endorsing vendors. This is particularly a problem for small vendors who don’t have a large client base. It’s something of a catch-22 because retailers in those situations often claim that the solutions are so valuable they want to enjoy a window of exclusivity and differentiation that they can use against their competition.
We humans have 50% of our DNA in common with bananas? I don’t remember where I first stumbled across this little factoid, but it was, as it was probably designed to be, just wacky enough to catch my attention. As far as advancing scientific knowledge, does it do much more ? I don’t think so. This little factoid is interesting, but not valuable.
Retailers have been struggling with the idea that they need to shift away from being product-centric, to being more customer-centric. It’s a hard shift to take. Retail used to be defined by the products a company sold. No one cared who bought them, so long as “merchant princes” decided which products were the right ones […]
Right before the Labor Day weekend, I caught this article on Ad Age, a motherhood and flying cars piece about how digital will magically transform the store experience, and even better, how digital agencies will be the leaders in making this transformation happen.
