By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
1/22/2008
It’s ironic that the annual NRF show’s roots are in Times Square (for those of you who remember, before there was a Javits Convention Center, the NRF’s Big Show used to be held at the mid-town Hilton and Sheraton, starting on mezzanines and extending into rabbit warren-like basements). Times have changed. Much of this year’s NRF looked a lot like the digital media displays in Times Square today; replete with pixels and pizzazz. It made the Mother Cabrini Marching Band of days gone by seem downright quiet and serene. Just when you didn’t think it could get any bigger… it did!
It would be unfair for us to try to list in detail all that we saw, or even passed by. With over 65 e-mails containing press releases in my in-box, and after sitting through more than 30 meetings, 2 breakfasts and 4 dinners across two and a half days, it would be impossible to do justice to the details. Yes, the booths across the front of the floor are now twice the size of the average single family home, and definitely business was brisk at all of the 400 plus booths. But these are just the logistics of it.
What you look to us for are trends, and trends we shall give you.
Mobility – RSR has been singing the song of mobility for quite some time now. Theme 1: Un-tether the store manager from his work station. Theme 2: Drive content to the consumer, both through store owned equipment and the customer’s mobile phone. Theme 3: Bring video media outside the home, and into the world of retail. All of these are coming to pass. The customer can, and does DVR her way past most commercials in the home, so CPG manufacturers are willing to put content where consumers can see it and can’t fast-forward through it – during the shopping experience. The price of employee-held devices is coming down dramatically accompanied by the applications that match. Outside the world of NRF, NBC held a special event to show its out-of-home video solution.
Self-Service – Some of us like it and some of us don’t, but self-service is here to stay. Kiosks, self-check-out and to some extent the mobility applications mentioned above are being put forth as a way to keep payroll costs down and create a non-intrusive in-store environment for customers who prefer not to be approached by sales personnel.
Video Surveillance Applications – Vendors continue to offer up more creative uses for the video cameras already in the store. From traditional Loss Prevention to traffic counting, to merchandising and compliance checking, video applications were all over the place (and the lines of customers and prospects quite deep in the booths).
Personalization – This is a fairly broad topic, but it runs thematically across many different technologies. From localized assortments, through more personalized loyalty programs and targeted marketing, retailers are using business intelligence to create a less generic and more tailored experience for customers.
Green is Good – We thought that sustainability wasn’t all that interesting to most retailers, but there certainly seems to be a lot of buzz on the subject. We saw many vendors advertising green initiatives, and we saw retailers listening. In fact, the interest was strong enough that we’re thinking of adding a benchmark report on sustainability to our research agenda. The moral truth is – global warming is an important issue. The cold truth is – oil at $100 a barrel makes sustainability and green initiatives very cost-effective.
Cautious Optimism – At one of the three dinners I attended on Monday night (don’t ask…), a Wall Street analyst commented that given the reports coming out of Wall Street on the economy, retailers seemed strangely upbeat. This is no mean feat, given the almost hourly bulletins put out by wsj.com on the latest economic crisis, bank write-down and other bad news. The reality is retailers have learned to scale back on their inventory investments to some extent. Some have decided it’s better to be under-sold than over-inventoried. These retailers know that even in a down economy, somebody wins consumer dollars. And they look to technology to help them be that someone.
The bottom line from my perspective is continuing convergence. Channels converge, retail segments converge, and technologies converge to support them. We see the same engine that drives pricing decisions driving other forecast decisions. The industry is lurching towards a single version of merchandising truth, made necessary by a proliferation of forecast engines that threaten to confuse everyone. We see business intelligence supporting the entire enterprise.
This is my take on the biggest trends. This is really retailing’s Big Show… we were happy the predicted blizzard didn’t happen, and it wasn’t too, too cold. Expect another wild and crazy retail ride this year.
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