After 18 months of tremendous change accelerated by an enduring pandemic, the retail industry has reached an inflection point. Expanding and varying customer needs, coupled with re-emerging competition, require new ways of thinking. Or is it an old way of thinking?
The customer is always right, but for that premise to be true, then the future of grocery must be designed for the benefit of the customer, not to coerce them. It’s not the user experience that is changing, but that the customer will change it. However, to give a better grocery experience requires connecting a series of dots that meet the evolving customer ethos. Grocery must be evaluated across all the channels, forming a network with a new portfolio. Let’s call it Retail Portfolio 2.0 – a concept centered on the entire store portfolio, addressed from the customer point of view. It requires connecting the need, the timing and the delivery method to succeed, but that success only happens when the silos of logistics, store design and construction fade away.
This isn’t a simple process. Retailers often appear just as confused and are divided in attitudes toward innovation, the ability and willingness to make capital investment, and the need to rethink the future store. Over the past two decades, retailers considered only a physical retail portfolio network. Fast-forward to today, and we see a new interconnected environment.
We believe providing an optimal store experience means the merging of physical and digital strategy. Customers are coming to expect the option of a digital experience to meet their variety of needs. With that in mind, here are four typology “dots” that need to be considered and merged to create this new interconnected retail portfolio network. They are:
These typologies are designed and networked to optimize clusters and address consumer need states via hub-and-spoke logistics, in-store automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS), and click-and-collect. As with a traditional retail portfolio network, the key focus here is on customer convenience in a way that keeps up with changes in the marketplace. Connecting the dots really is all about a long-term view of the future, because the store of the future is not always a place, but rather an experience of how brands continue to address customer need states, regardless of the era. A few things to keep in mind:
The entire retail ecosystem innovates and drives the customer experience forward. It’s more than just knowing the need states of your shoppers. It’s knowing how to address those needs in a way that marries technology with shopper convenience and a sophisticated back-end network.
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