BILLION DIGITAL BUYERS. Akshay Vemuganti

      Digital Transformation is a global megatrend, becoming a top priority on every retail CEO’s agenda. Gartner predicts total IT spent to touch 4 trillion by 2018. Cognitive Future, Design Thinking, Mobile First, Social Media and Cloud Enablement are beyond just buzz words, increasingly becoming a focus at the C-level.

      Today retailers are charged up to go ‘All in’ with Digital as the guiding principle. New roles like Chief Digital Officer and new functions like Digital Compliance, Digital Operations are being introduced. Retail enthusiasts and industry experts are aggressively evangelizing how to create high performing Digital teams.

      From the above table, notice the significant decline in valuation market value for BestBuy, JC Penney, Kohl’s, Macy's, Nordstrom, and Sears. Digital Disruption is quickly eating up traditional retail businesses, adding more pressure and confusion to a departmental store format.

      Technology like money, it can make or break a business, sort of a ‘love-hate’ problem. Many retail leaders have prioritized technological initiatives over other projects. Regardless of the category, today if a brick and motor retailer not powered by Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social, Cognitive it might lose customers to the advanced digital players.

      Back in the day, competition came directly from the obvious rivals. In the 1900s, Neiman Marcus competed with Nordstrom and, 7 eleven competed with Dollar General in the 1930s. Today, it’s almost impossible to predict your competition. A sophomore can write a commerce app overnight using Node.js frameworks and lambda functions, test it really quick, push it to her friends and start collecting orders on campus before even conventional stores open; there-by give a hard fight for traditional retail to respond, adapt to the shifting sands of digital.

      Gut-based age-old retailing methods have been replaced by data-driven decisions. Many successful incumbents put data at the heart of every business decision. Winning with data, an unspoken guiding principle and a corporate philosophy at many successful companies. What makes it even more fascinating when the constant change adds along. Data never remains the same. It changes rapidly with time, trends, regions, forcing the businesses to constantly adapt, evolve and innovate.

      “Data is the oil of the 21st century. Alibaba relies heavily on the data we collect. We accumulate tons of consumer data. We know who is the buyer; we know what is his home address; we know what are his favorite brands, and we know whether he has a kid etc.” said, Daniel Zhang Alibaba’s CEO, in a Wall Street Journal article.

      We live in a Data-Driven economy. And, when the retailers and brands don’t realize and disrupt their working style; satisfying the ever-demanding consumer becomes an increasing problem. Be it the e-commerce gold rush in Asia or rise of the last mile delivery ‘Unicorns’, making retail industry at the peak of Digital Disruption.

      Let’s face it, we live in the day and age where you need a strong Wi-Fi connection to fire up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance and lure the digital buyer to build the next billion-dollar empire.

      (Featured photo by https://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/blogs/the-next-era-of-retail-disruption-experience-2/)