Nothing ever changes

Until it does

Last week saw the venerable UK retail trade paper Retail Week celebrate its 35th Birthday.

I’m a big fan of the paper, both because of its news coverage but also its campaigning and events activities which do a lot to bring the retail sector together to share ideas and build networks.

But the anniversary got me thinking. My own stint in the retail and hospitality sectors is shorter than that - it’s 17 years since I first took responsibility for 400 Vodafone stores, the point in my career where I felt like I shifted from marketer to running commercial channels.

But whether your horizon is 17 years, 35 or somewhere in between, what are the big things that have changed in retailing over that period?

From day to day, it can be hard to tell. A clever person once said to me that “less will change in the next 2 years than you expect, but more will change in the next 10 years than you expect” and so far I think that has turned out to be very accurate. In the heat of month to month living, we often don’t notice individual changes as seismic shifts, but then suddenly you think about 10 years ago and everything is different.

So what has changed in the retail sector over the last couple of decades?

A great deal has stayed the same - the foundations of a great retail store visit, for example, remain attractive merchandising, good product availability, a bright and inviting store and engaged and knowledgeable sales colleagues. So it is tempting, on first glance, to conclude that retailing is the same as it ever was.

But it isn’t. E-commerce has grown from nothing to a huge part of retailing over that period. Many great retail brands have disappeared from our High Streets. Customer expectations are much greater, and their ability to share their experiences with each other (and indeed, to shape your brand for you) has been transformed by social media.

It’s hard to pin all of that change down to a single underlying cause, and there probably isn’t one, but if I had to settle on a single thing that I think has changed retail more than anything else it is this - data.

Our ability to gather, store, process and share data has been transformed over the last 2 decades. That’s partly about the internet, of course, but underlying that are a whole list of technical innovations which have quietly generated the data revolution. More (and more powerful) electronic devices in stores and warehouses. The arrival of mobile data networks meaning information can be passed seamlessly from one place to another. The evolution of machine learning and other computational techniques that can help us make sense of a wall of data.

All of these are contributing factors to the big change in retail reality - that we now operate in a world where both our businesses, and our customers, have more access to more information than they ever have before.

Once you follow that thread, it is hard to over-state how much operating a modern retail business is transformed from what it was 2 decades ago. Warehouses are managed with full knowledge of which products are where, and are even now becoming entirely automated. Stock is shipped to store based on sophisticated models of what is needed in each location rather than based on gut feel and guesswork. Store performance, and even sales colleague performance is measurable in granular detail.

Management meetings and Board meetings now are awash with data points - so much so that the art is often picking the right insights to act on.

But the biggest way in which the ‘data revolution’ has changed retail, in my view, is in how it has impacted customers themselves. As customers we are now armed with all of the information we could possibly ask for on every product we could possibly buy. I can stand in your store and compare your prices, availability and product specs with your competitors on my phone.

Where once, as I’ve written here before, the role of the retailer was essentially about distribution, the arrival of perfect information in the customer’s hands means that in order to answer the age-old question “why should I buy from you” we now need to look beyond simply “because I have the product and it is miles to my nearest competitor”.

And coming up with new answers to that challenge, and winning customers’ business even when they have all of that data to hand, has changed what it means to be a successful retailer and will continue to do so. The data revolution isn’t over yet.

What has changed about retailing during your career, and how do you think it will change next? I’d love to hear your views in the comment section below.