Wednesday, 26 February 2014
Monday, 13 January 2014
What could happen in China in 2014?
The year ahead could see companies focus on driving productivity, CIOs becoming a hot commodity, shopping malls going bankrupt, and European soccer clubs finally investing in Chinese ones. McKinsey director Gordon Orr makes his annual predictions.
2. CIOs become a hot commodityThis productivity focus will extend beyond manufacturing. In agriculture, the pace at which larger farms emerge should accelerate, spurring mechanization and more efficient irrigation and giving farmers the ability to finance the purchase of higher-quality seeds. Services will also be affected: for companies where labor is now the fastest-growing cost, a sustained edge in productivity may make all the difference. And in industry after industry, companies will feel the disruptive impact of technology, which will help them generate more from less and potentially spawn entirely new business models. Consider China’s banking sector, where bricks-and-mortar scale has been a critical differentiator for the past two decades. If private bank start-ups were allowed, could we see a digital-only model, offering comprehensive services without high physical costs? Will Chinese consumers be willing to bank online? Absolutely—if their willingness to shop online is any guide.
January 2014 | byGordon Orr
1. Two phrases will be important for 2014: ‘productivity growth’ and ‘technological disruption’
China’s labor costs continue to rise by more than 10 percent a year, land costs are pricing offices out of city centers, the cost of energy and water is growing so much that they may be rationed in some geographies, and the cost of capital is higher, especially for state-owned enterprises. Basically, all major input costs are growing, while intense competition and, often, overcapacity make it incredibly hard to pass price increases onto customers. China’s solution? Higher productivity. Companies will adopt global best practices from wherever they can be found, which explains why recent international field trips of Chinese executives have taken on a much more serious, substantive tone.
2. CIOs become a hot commodityThis productivity focus will extend beyond manufacturing. In agriculture, the pace at which larger farms emerge should accelerate, spurring mechanization and more efficient irrigation and giving farmers the ability to finance the purchase of higher-quality seeds. Services will also be affected: for companies where labor is now the fastest-growing cost, a sustained edge in productivity may make all the difference. And in industry after industry, companies will feel the disruptive impact of technology, which will help them generate more from less and potentially spawn entirely new business models. Consider China’s banking sector, where bricks-and-mortar scale has been a critical differentiator for the past two decades. If private bank start-ups were allowed, could we see a digital-only model, offering comprehensive services without high physical costs? Will Chinese consumers be willing to bank online? Absolutely—if their willingness to shop online is any guide.
There is a paradox when it comes to technology in China. On the one hand, the country excels in consumer-oriented tech services and products, and it boasts the world’s largest e-commerce market and a very vibrant Internet and social-media ecosystem. On the other hand, it has been a laggard in applying business technology in an effective way. As one of our surveys1 recently showed, Chinese companies widely regard the IT function as strong at helping to run the business, not at helping it to grow. Indeed, simply trying to find the CIO in many Chinese state-owned enterprises is akin to hunting for a needle in a haystack.
Yet the CIOs’ day is coming. The productivity imperative is making technology a top-team priority for the first time in many enterprises. Everything is on the table: digitizing existing processes and eliminating labor, reaching consumers directly through the Internet, transforming the supply chain, reinventing the business model. The problem is that China sorely lacks the business-savvy, technology-capable talent to lead this effort. Strong CIOs should expect large compensation increases—they are the key executives in everything from aligning IT and business strategies to building stronger internal IT teams and adopting new technologies, such as cloud computing or big data.
3. The government focuses on jobs, not growth
Expect the Chinese government’s rhetoric and focus to shift from economic growth to job creation. The paradox of rising input costs (including wages), the productivity push, and technological disruption is that they collectively undermine job growth, at the very time China needs more jobs. Millions and millions of them. While few companies are shifting manufacturing operations out of the country, they are putting incremental production capacity elsewhere and investing heavily in automation.
For example, Foxconn usually hires the bulk of its workers for a given 12-month span just after the Chinese New Year. Yet at the beginning of last year, the company announced that it wouldn’t hire any entry-level workers, as automation and better employee retention had reduced its needs. Although upswings in the company’s hiring still occur (as with last year’s iPhone 5S and 5C release), the gradual rollout of robots will probably reduce demand for factory workers going forward. In short, many manufacturers—both multinational and Chinese—are producing more with less.
So as technology enables massive disruptions in service industries and sales forces, what happens to millions of retail jobs when sales move online? To millions of insurance sales agents? Millions of bank clerks? Even business-to-business sales folks may find themselves partially disintermediated by technology, and rising numbers of graduates will have fewer and fewer jobs that meet their expectations. They will not be happy about this and may not be passive. Finally, while state-owned enterprises will feel pressure to improve their performance, to use capital more efficiently, and to deal with market forces, they are likely, at the same time, to face pressure to hire and retain staff they may not really need. The government and the leaders of these enterprises have long argued that such jobs are among the most secure. They will find it very hard to declare them expendable.
4. There will be more M&A in logistics
As everyone pushes for greater productivity, logistics is a rich source of potential gains. State-owned enterprises dominate in capital expenditure–intensive logistics, such as shipping, ports, toll roads, rail, and airports; small mom-and-pop entrepreneurs are the norm in segments such as road transportation. This sector costs businesses in China way more than it should. With upward of $500 billion in annual revenues, logistics is an industry ripe for massive infusions of capital, operational best practices, and consolidation. Driven by the pressure to increase productivity, that’s already happening at a rapid pace in areas such as express delivery, warehousing, and cold chain. Private and foreign participation is increasingly encouraged in many parts of the sector, and its competitive intensity is likely to rise.
5. Crumbling buildings get much-needed attention
While China’s flagship buildings are architectural wonders built to the highest global standards of quality and energy efficiency, they are unfortunately the exception, not the rule. Much of the residential and office construction in China over the past 30 years used low-quality methods, as well as materials that are aging badly. Some cities are reaching a tipping point: clusters of buildings barely 20 years old are visibly decaying. Many will need to be renovated thoroughly, others to be knocked down and rebuilt. Who will pay for this? What will happen if residential buildings filled with private owners who sank their life savings into an apartment now find it declining in value and, perhaps, unsellable? Alongside a wave of reconstruction, prepare for a wave of local protests against developers and, in some cases, local governments too.
6. The country doubles down on high-speed rail
When China inaugurated its high-speed rail lines, seven years ago, many observers declared them another infrastructure boondoggle that would never be used at capacity. How wrong they were: daily ridership soared from 250,000 in 2007 to 1.3 million last year, fuelled partly by aggressive ticket prices. Demand was simply underestimated. Now that trains run as often as every 15 minutes on the Shanghai–Nanjing line, business and retail clusters are merging and people are making weekly day-trips rather than monthly two-day visits. The turnaround of ideas is faster; market visibility is better; and many people come to Shanghai for the day to browse and shop. There are already more than 9,000 kilometers (5,592 miles) of operational lines—and that’s set to double by 2015. If the “market decides” framing of China’s Third Plenum applies here, much of the investment should switch from building brand-new lines to increasing capacity on routes that are already proven successes.
7. Solar industry survivors flourish
Many solar stocks, while nowhere near their all-time highs, more than tripled in value in 2013. For the entire industry, and specifically for Chinese players, it was a year of much-needed relief. By November, ten of the Chinese solar-panel manufacturers that lost money in 2012 reported third-quarter profits, driven by demand from Japan in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. (Japan’s installed capacity quadrupled, from 1.7 gigawatts in 2012 to more than 6 gigawatts by the end of 2013.) Domestic demand also picked up as the State Grid Corporation of China allowed some small-scale distributed solar-power plants to be connected to the grid, while a State Council subsidy program even prompted panel manufacturers to invest in building and operating solar farms—an initiative that will ramp up further.
This year is likely to see even stronger demand. Aided by international organizations, including the World Bank, an increasing number of developing countries (such as India) regard scaling up distributed power as a way of improving access to electricity. In addition, solar-energy prices continue to fall rapidly, driven down by technological innovations and a focus on operational efficiency. While I’m on green topics, I’ll point out that the coming months are also likely to see another effort to create a real Chinese electric-vehicle market. The push will be centered on the launch of the first vehicle from Shenzhen BYD Daimler New Technology.
8. Mall developers go bankrupt—especially state-owned ones
Shopping malls are losing ground to the online marketplace. While overall retail sales are growing, e-retail sales jumped by 50 percent in 2013. Although the rate of growth may slow in 2014, it will be significant. Yet developers have already announced plans to increase China’s shopping-mall capacity by 50 percent during the next three years. For an industry that generates a significant portion of its returns from a percentage of the sales of retailers in its malls, this looks rash indeed. If clothing and electronics stores are pulling back on the number of outlets, what will fill these malls? Certainly, more restaurants, cinemas, health clinics, and dental and optical providers. But banks and financial-service advisers are moving online, as are tutorial and other education services.
I expect malls in weaker locations to suffer disproportionately. These are often owned by smaller developers that can’t afford better locations or by city-sponsored state-owned developers that are expanding into new cities. The weak will get weaker, and while they may be able to consolidate, it’s more likely they will go out of business.
9. The Shanghai Free Trade Zone will be fairly quiet
In early October, there was much speculation about the size of the opportunity after the State Council issued the Overall Plan for the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone (FTZ), and the Shanghai municipality issued its “negative list” of restricted and prohibited projects just a few days later at the end of September. For the FTZ, the only change so far appears to be that companies allowed to invest in it will not have to go through an approval process. As for the negative list, while there’s a possibility that Shanghai will ease the limitations, for the moment the list very much matches the categories for restricted and prohibited projects in the government’s fifth Catalog of Industries for Guiding Foreign Investment. This ambiguous situation gives the authorities, as usual, full freedom to maintain the status quo or to pursue bolder liberalization in the FTZ in 2014 if they see a need for a stimulus of some kind. On balance, I’d say this is relatively unlikely to happen.
10. European soccer teams invest in the Chinese Super League
I know, I know—I’m making exactly the same prediction I did a year ago. True, Chinese football has battled both corruption and a lack of long-term vision. It’s also true that the Chinese Super League still trails Spain’s La Liga and the English Premier League in television ratings. That’s in spite of roping in stars such as Nicolas Anelka and Didier Drogba (who both returned to Europe this year) and even David Beckham (as an “ambassador”).
At least this year some things started to improve. After all, Guangzhou Evergrande just won Asia’s premier club competition—the AFC Champions League—a year after hiring Italy’s seasoned coach Marcelo Lippi. This international success could be temporary, but there is a shared sense in China that something has to change because there is so much underleveraged potential. Maybe Rupert Murdoch’s decision to invest in the Indian football league will precipitate more openness among Chinese football administrators? Perhaps the catalyst will be the news that the Qatari investors in Manchester City also invested in a New York City soccer franchise? An era of cross-border synergies from the development and branding of sister soccer teams is coming closer.
Finally, something that’s less a prediction than a request. Can we declare the end of the “BRICs”? When the acronym came into common use, a decade ago, the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—contributed roughly 20 percent of global economic growth. Although China was already the heavyweight, it did not yet dominate: in 2004, the country contributed 13 percent of global growth in gross domestic product, while Brazil, Russia, and India combined contributed 9 percent, with similar growth rates. Compare that with the experience of the past two years. China accounted for 26 percent of global economic growth in 2012 and for 29 percent in 2013. The collective share of Brazil, Russia, and India has shrunk to just 7 percent. It’s time to let BRIC sink.
Monday, 16 December 2013
Success Mantra
"Only Normal People Says That..
Success Knocks Your Door Once,
But Achievers Says..
Knock The Door of Failure to Meet SUCCESS"
"Some Times In Life one Feeling Comes..
That All Door Are CLOSED,
When That Happen in Your Life,
Remember This Word That..
ALL CLOSED DOOR ARE NOT LOCKED"
Saturday, 14 December 2013
How retailers can keep up with consumers
The retail industry is more dynamic than ever. US retailers must evolve to succeed in the next decade.
October 2013 | byIan MacKenzie, Chris Meyer, and Steve Noble
The North American retail landscape looks quite different today than it did even ten years ago. The way that consumers make purchasing decisions has dramatically altered: they stand in stores, using their smartphones to compare prices and product reviews; family and friends instantly weigh in on shopping decisions via social media; and when they’re ready to buy, an ever-growing list of online retailers deliver products directly to them, sometimes on the same day.
These shifts have led a number of industry observers to forecast the end of retail as we know it. Some predict that retail will change more in the next five years than it has over the past century and that the extinction of brick-and-mortar stores isn’t far off. Our view is less dramatic, but we do believe that big changes are inevitable and that retailers must act now to win in the long term.
There is historical precedent for this kind of upheaval, which recasts the industry’s winners and losers. Within the past century, local corner stores gave way to department stores and supermarkets, then to suburban shopping malls, then to discount chains and big-box retailers. Each of these shifts unfolded faster than the one that preceded it, and each elevated new companies over incumbents. Indeed, six of the ten largest US retailers in 1990 have since fallen from their positions as new winners, such as Amazon.com, Costco, and Walgreens, emerged in their place (Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1
Shifts in the retail industry often create new winners, as evidenced by changes in the top ten US retailers.
Yet history also offers incumbent retailers some hope: industry shifts have actually tended to unfold slowly—over decades, in most cases—providing time to react. While it is true that powerful forces are at work in retail today, we believe their full impact won’t be felt for years. (For instance, despite the e-commerce boom, brick-and-mortar stores should still account for approximately 85 percent of US retail sales in 2025.1 ) That said, incumbent retailers can’t expect to stay successful by going about business as usual. In this article, we discuss the major trends reshaping the retail landscape and the actions we believe retailers must take if they are to ride the wave instead of being swept away.
The trends that will matter most
Drawing on our research and experience working with companies across the North American retail sector, we believe that five trends will have a significant impact on the industry: demographic changes, multichannel and mobile commerce, personalized marketing, the distribution revolution, and emerging retail business models. Each trend is powerful on its own, and collectively they will redefine what it takes to be a successful retailer.
The rise of boomers, Hispanics, and millennials
Economic indicators do not paint a rosy picture for retailers: budget deficits are mounting, unemployment remains high, and the average consumer’s balance sheet—while improving—remains shaky, for it has taken more than five years to recover the $16 trillion in net worth US consumers lost from peak to trough in the recent recession. Additionally, rising social costs related to health care, taxes, higher education, and other areas will continue to stress disposable income. Indeed, most industry forecasts suggest that US retail growth over the next five years will average 3 to 4 percent annually, well below the 5 to 7 percent yearly growth seen in the decade prior to the recession.2
We believe that these projections are reasonable and that this slower growth rate is likely to extend well beyond the five-year time horizon, becoming the “new normal” (Exhibit 2). Within a tepid overall market, however, there will be several pockets of strong growth. Three customer segments that will make disproportionate contributions to spending growth, for example, must fit squarely into retailers’ customer-driven strategies. Each is unique and will require retailers to adapt their strategies to target the segments individually.
- Baby boomers. Some 47 million households headed by people over the age of 55 will account for the bulk of spending growth in major categories such as food (92 percent), housewares (73 percent), and apparel (56 percent).3 The segment’s sheer size will drive growth in these categories, but boomers will also disproportionally spend their disposable income on services and experiences instead of off-the-shelf products.
- Hispanic consumers. The retail spending of Hispanic consumers will nearly double over the next ten years and account for almost one-fifth of total retail spending.4 Importantly, Hispanics spend money differently from other consumers—for example, they spend at least one and a half times more on children’s apparel, footwear, and fresh food than non-Hispanic consumers do—and retailers will have to account for this accordingly.
- Millennials. People between the ages of 13 and 30 constitute 15 percent of US consumers. Millennials are the first group that grew up after the Internet, social media, and mobile became the norm—most have never known a world without them. They will account for nearly one-third of total spending by 2020.5 Even through the economic tumult of the past five years, the spending of millennials has grown by 3 percent a year.
The world’s largest store in every pocket
Over the past decade, US e-commerce has grown at an impressive clip of almost 18 percent a year.6 It now accounts for 8 percent of total retail sales. With the accelerating adoption of mobile—US smartphone penetration exceeds 40 percent today and is projected to reach nearly 60 percent in three years—digital commerce is poised to explode, bringing shopping quite literally into the palms of many consumers’ hands.7 For some retailers, mobile is already a huge factor: at designer-fashion retailer Gilt, for instance, mobile accounts for about 50 percent of daily traffic and more than 30 percent of total sales. Mobile technologies will increasingly influence every stage of the customer’s shopping journey—from personalized promotions prompted by geotargeting to in-store research and price checks, as well as to payment capabilities that offer checkout options beyond waiting in line. A recent McKinsey survey of digital shoppers highlights how mobile technology can complement the in-store experience; for example, almost half of the consumers who conduct research on their mobile phones have done so while in stores, and half say they’re open to the idea of in-store mobile payments.8Indeed, while just two years ago mobile accounted for only 3 percent of e-commerce sales, that figure will probably rise to 15 percent by the end of 2013.9
Highly personalized marketing
Habits of consuming content have changed dramatically. US consumers doubled their spending on digital newspapers in the past seven years, for example, while halving their spending on print newspapers.10 As more consumers abandon print media for digital media, marketers follow: 44 percent of them now allocate at least half of their marketing budgets to digital media, up from only 31 percent in 2009.11
We’re already seeing that direct mail and newspaper circulars are playing a diminished role in retail marketing. Mass advertising will not disappear overnight, but its influence is certainly waning. Ads are shifting toward not just digitization but also personalization, powered by increasingly sophisticated algorithms and predictive models that analyze transaction data and digital-media trends (for example, what topics are hot on social networks). Already, 35 percent of what consumers purchase on Amazon and 75 percent of what they watch on Netflix come from product recommendations based on such algorithms.
Company-directed marketing is also competing for attention with peer recommendations through social networks, user reviews, and the like. Our research shows that for the average consumer, peer recommendations carry ten times more weight than recommendations from salespeople. Indeed, social media could well make up 22 percent of marketing budgets in five years as retailers increase their spending to facilitate and influence peer connections about brands through paid ads and branded pages on social-media platforms such as Facebook, Ibotta, and Pinterest.
A distribution revolution
Amazon already offers same-day delivery in ten cities and guarantees one- to two-day ground delivery in the continental United States. It is not unreasonable to think that consumers will expect comparable shipping speeds from all retailers—we expect same-day delivery to become available soon in at least the top 150 metropolitan statistical areas, which hold nearly 75 percent of the population.12Furthermore, we believe retailers will offer shipping free of charge to their most loyal and profitable customers, as opposed to providing it only for those who make minimum purchases. We also expect to see third-party distribution services evolve and expand. Some companies may make big investments in distribution infrastructure and sell it as a service to other retailers, as Amazon and eBay do now. Others are beginning to invest in infrastructure to provide convenient and secure package-delivery locations: lockers and pickup boxes are appearing in groceries, convenience stores, and drugstores nationwide, and new services are sprouting up to let retailers ship packages for pickup at other retail locations or self-storage facilities.
Consumers have come to expect simple and seamless processes not only for receiving the products they’ve purchased but also for returning unwanted products. Free and easy returns—including the ability to return or exchange online purchases in stores—are becoming table stakes.
New retail business models
No doubt, retail competition just keeps getting tougher. Consider the ongoing blurring of lines between formats and sectors as retailers try to steal shopping trips and share from one another (for instance, fresh food is no longer the dominion of supermarkets alone but is also increasingly found in warehouse clubs, convenience stores, pharmacies, and even dollar stores). Furthermore, players across the value chain are encroaching on what used to be the exclusive turf of retailers. More manufacturers are selling directly to consumers; examples include Apple, Nike, and—via Vitacost.com—several consumer-product manufacturers. Tech players are also fighting for consumer retail dollars: Google offers more than one billion products for sale on Google Shopping and may soon open retail stores.13 Additionally, companies such as craigslist, eBay, and Etsy (home to almost a million small businesses) are creating marketplaces where individuals and entrepreneurs can sell their wares to the masses. Finally, rental and aftermarket-circulation models, such as Chegg for textbooks or Rent the Runway for designer fashion, are eating into traditional demand for retail goods.
Competition is coming from near and far as technology makes retailing much more global than it has ever been. UK online retailer ASOS.com, for example, offers free two-day shipping worldwide for a relatively small membership fee, and at times as a promotional offer to all customers. Until recently, retailers didn’t have to worry much about global competition until stores started sprouting down the street—nor did they have an opportunity to access global consumers from North America—but that is changing as technology helps break down barriers and generates new retail business models.
What retailers should do
These trends will put considerable strain on the traditional retailers’ economic model, with challenges to both the top and bottom lines. On the revenue front, the biggest obstacle will come from a channel shift: in-store purchases will grow by only about 2 or 3 percent a year, and some formats should see in-store sales decline by 5 to 7 percent a year. Gross margins will come under pressure from both price transparency (retailers will need to keep prices low to stay competitive) and a reduced share of trade spending (vendors will allocate fewer trade dollars to secure shelf space in physical stores and more to promote brands in the digital realm, where retailers are but one of many ways to reach consumers). To increase revenues, gain share, remain profitable, and manage capital investment effectively over the next 10 or 15 years, retailers must take aggressive action. Specifically, they should heed the following five imperatives.
Expand revenue and profit pools
Almost all retailers are investing in multichannel capabilities, as they should. Yet a more fundamental reinvention may be needed: Amazon, which most retailers view as a chief competitor, acts as a traditional retailer in only 35 percent of its customer transactions. The majority of the products bought by Amazon’s customers flow through its marketplace or its fulfillment services for third-party sellers.
Business-model evolution has been fairly common in other sectors—consider the well-documented shift of both GE and IBM from product- to services-based companies—but retailers have traditionally been slow to reinvent themselves. As pressure mounts on traditional sell-through revenue, incumbent retailers too must find new profit pools. Sears and Wal-Mart Stores, for instance, are earning “rent” on their digital assets by establishing third-party marketplaces similar to Amazon’s. Best Buy is using its store space to partner with Samsung in more than 1,000 Samsung Experience Shops, a store-within-a-store format housed within Best Buy locations.
To maximize the chance of sustaining long-term growth and profitability, retail executives should be thinking ahead: to win in the future, how much revenue should come from nonproduct sales? If retail sales of traditional products and services drop by 10 percent in five years’ time, do retailers have enough initiatives in place to discover, test, and expand future revenue sources? Beyond physical or digital shelf space, which assets could a retailer exploit?
Create a road map to cut costs
The retail industry’s growth over the past decade has masked a lot of inefficiency. With the growth outlook now dimmed considerably, retailers must take a hard look at operating costs. We believe all retailers should address three cost levers: direct product costs, the indirect costs of goods not for resale, and labor costs. Retailers that tackle these levers comprehensively can reduce costs by up to 20 to 30 percent, which is what they’ll need to do in an intensely competitive environment.
Managing direct costs through vendor negotiations remains important but is no longer sufficient. Increasingly, leading retailers use techniques such as private-label “design to value,” in which they identify the features consumers value most and redesign products accordingly, aiming to strip out anything that increases costs, but not value, to consumers.
Progressive retailers are attacking indirect costs with similar rigor—for instance, by developing “should cost” models to reset the dialogue with vendors from delivering modest year-over-year unit-price reductions to redefining unit costs altogether. One retailer used a detailed cost teardown of its in-store technology hardware to reduce costs by more than 40 percent in several infrastructure-spending categories. We also see retailers removing or redeploying up to 30 percent of costs in store operations and corporate-support functions by applying lean techniques and accelerating offshoring.
Retailers should continue to offshore portions of their support functions, such as finance, HR, and IT, but to remain cost competitive they may also need to offshore elements of core retail functions, such as merchandising and marketing analytics. The most successful retailers are also taking work out—not only shifting it to lower-cost models but also eliminating it altogether. When reflecting on cost structures, retail executives should ask themselves several questions: do we understand the economics of our major vendors well enough to know their true costs and what profit margins they’re making from our business? Are we managing the cost of core retail functions and back-office functions by considering a comprehensive set of efficiency levers? A negative response to either of these questions should spur action.
Reduce—and reconfigure—the real-estate portfolio
As purchases migrate to digital channels, most retailers will need less physical selling space in stores. Although some formats (such as groceries) will be relatively unaffected, others (such as consumer electronics and toys) will be hit profoundly and could require square-footage reductions of half or more to deliver a compelling customer experience and economics. Retailers are already seeing this phenomenon, and a real-estate rebalancing is under way as they reassess what should be sold through physical space; in 2012 alone, major chains shuttered approximately 4,500 stores in the United States, and newly opened stores are some 25 percent smaller than the average size of existing ones.
We believe retailers should move quickly and take a hard look at future space needs and mobilize now to right-size their store networks. Given the sensitivity of property values to levels of available inventory, the earlier that retailers shed unneeded real estate the better off they’re likely to be—and this is especially true for retailers that own the underlying real estate. Those that rent space should negotiate to create flexibility through leases of shorter duration, in particular for properties with less certain futures.
Real-estate implications also extend to space that will remain in the portfolio in the long term as it will play a different role than it has in the past. To win consumers’ loyalty, stores can’t simply be places where products happen to be sold. For many retailers, future store layouts will have to foster greater customer learning and experimentation. Technology will need to be fully integrated into how stores and employees engage customers. And the lines between physical and digital must continue to blur—for example, as stores become fulfillment and return centers for online orders.
One indication of how we expect the role of stores to be transformed is evident in the fact that 40 percent of Best Buy’s and more than 50 percent of Wal-Mart’s online sales already are picked up in stores. To make informed network choices, we believe, retailers must take a long-term view of their real-estate footprint. How will their core formats’ size and space allocation evolve in the next ten years? What will be required to enable new multichannel experiences? Beyond building stores, what asset-light expansion models are available when retailers look for growth?
Get serious about using data and analytics for decision making
Forward-thinking retailers are leveraging the vast amounts of data they possess and building analytical muscle to enable targeted marketing, tailored assortments, and effective pricing and promotions. Gathering and analyzing data to understand the needs, preferences, and attitudes of growing consumer segments, such as Hispanics, baby boomers, and millennials, will be especially important, as will understanding individual consumers and customizing offers on a one-on-one basis.
Retailers should use advanced analytics to make offers and decisions that are targeted and localized, as well as delivered in real time. These offers and decisions should be informed by product preferences and influences (for example, discounts to consumers who have “liked” a product on Facebook and have a desirable network of Facebook friends). They should also be customized by location (for instance, coupons that are targeted at regular coffee drinkers of a competing coffee shop a block away from where the consumer happens to be) and shopping occasions (say, an ad for a new bathing suit two weeks before a planned vacation).
Advanced analytics isn’t just about marketing decisions, however; data-driven insights can create value across the full business. Cutting-edge retailers are using them to tailor assortments at the store level, to anticipate changes in customer traffic patterns, and to determine optimal distribution routes, inventory levels, and allocations, simultaneously enhancing the customer experience and improving unit economics. A leading footwear retailer, for example, implemented a system that links inventory across channels. When a customer orders a pair of shoes online at full price, the system looks across the network for the store that has that pair in its inventory and is least likely to sell it at full price before the end of the season. The system then balances the extra cost of shipping that order from the store against the expected markdown from continuing to hold the shoes in the store. This exercise determines whether the order ought to be fulfilled from a store or from a centralized warehouse. In short, the system helps the retailer to make real-time fulfillment decisions that maximize expected profit.
Retail executives should continually assess their investments in data and analytics to ensure that they are bringing new insights to the biggest business problems: what steps is the company taking to turn data into practical suggestions and actions to increase revenues, reduce costs, or free up capital? What capabilities is it building to become a more customer-centric, analytically driven enterprise?
Rethink assortments and product offerings
As prices and inventory availability become more transparent, retailers will not survive just by being “pass through” sellers of national brands. They will have to give consumers a reason to choose their stores over competitors. No longer will consumers shop at a retailer simply because it happens to be where a product is distributed. Instead, they will seek out retailers that provide value in new and different ways. We believe retailers will need to offer deep product expertise (that is, they must help consumers decide what to buy and explain why it makes sense for them) and a unique product education (that is, they should help consumers learn how to use the product better and do this over time, not just during the moment of purchase). Additionally, retailers must do these things in an environment that is increasingly experiential (for example, fitting a golf club or curating a wardrobe using a “magic mirror,” which employs computer technology to show customers how clothes look on them, making the process more efficient and engaging). Retailers must also make it easy for consumers to engage when and how they want—say, from their mobile devices while they are at home or on the move.
Some retailers could position themselves as the champions of style or demand in certain segments, perhaps by developing products and services specifically for population groups that will drive retail spending. Macy’s, for example, has embarked on a major effort to court millennials, including the launch of 13 segment-specific brands, new destination zones within physical stores, and a marketing mix that includes social-media programs and a new blog. Others could engage their target segments in new ways to influence products and help curate the assortment. The use of crowdsourcing—instead of traditional focus groups—to advance product development could allow consumers to cocreate products with retailers, providing another point of differentiation and fostering deep loyalty and word-of-mouth benefits.
Winning retailers will proactively shape products and experiences for and with consumers by bringing them directly into key merchandising decisions. How are retailers engaging consumers in the development and curation of new products? How are they tapping into a broad network of marketplace partners to drive innovation, excitement, and experiences? How will they leverage exclusive brands and private labels to become destinations for consumers?
The retail environment is as dynamic today as it has ever been. Competition is intensifying and shifting to new arenas, and consumers are rapidly evolving their approach to purchase decisions. We believe the trends that will most affect the industry’s future are evident, and the imperatives are clear. The time to act is now. Retailers that do will be the winners when the next chapter of retailing history is written.
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