Collapse of the Middle
6 The Future Will Not Be Evenly Distributed
7 The Customer Is the Channel
8 Optimizing to Extinction
9 Defenders of the Status Quo
10 An Especially Bad Time to Be Boring
PART TWO The Journey to Remarkable
11 The Eight Essentials of Remarkable Retail
12 Essential #1 : Digitally Enabled
13 Essential #2 : Human-Centered
14 Essential #3 : Harmonized
15 Essential #4 : Mobile
16 Essential #5 : Personal
17 Essential #6 : Connected
18 Essential #7 : Memorable
19 Essential #8 : Radical
20 A Brave New World
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography and Additional Reading
Index
CHAPTER 1
An Epic Revolution
“Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.”
—GLORIA STEINEM
Physical retail isn’t dead. Boring retail is. You have likely read the stories about how online retail is taking over the world. And it’s true that the ability to have virtually any product delivered digitally has largely eliminated the need for stores that were once piled high with merchandise, their shelves lined with cardboard sleeves, cellophane, and plastic: books, CDs, DVDs, game cartridges. . . . Let’s take a brief moment to mourn Borders, Blockbuster, and all the others that faced the brutal reckoning of digital disruption during the past decade or so.
You might have heard that cheap money fueled two decades of overzealous expansion of commercial retail real estate. This rampant over-building is now experiencing a major, long-overdue correction. And anyone can plainly see that the once-great regional shopping mall is evolving, in many cases dramatically.
Yet it turns out, despite the clickbait headlines of a “retail apocalypse,” many overwhelmingly dominant brick-and-mortar retail brands are not only opening stores, they are posting strong overall growth and profits. So-called digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs) that once raised gobs of venture capital by eschewing those pesky and expensive annoyances called stores are now seeing most of their growth derived from the opening of physical locations. Apple and Amazon, two of the three most valuable retail brands in the world, clearly see their future success tied in some part to physical retail.
Yet a profound seismic shift is taking place. This shift is far more revolutionary than the evolution that has characterized retail for the past several decades.
The power in retail has shifted to the consumer. What was once scarce no longer is. We no longer go online, we live online. In most categories, digital channels (and, more and more, that means mobile) are central to the consumer’s shopping journey. Shopping channels are blurring. An abundance of choice, a veritable tsunami of information, an ever-more-cluttered world, and an increasingly distracted customer make it nearly impossible for a brand to be a clear and compelling signal, standing out and commanding attention amid all the noise.
The differences between the retail haves and have-nots are becoming far more pronounced. This great bifurcation started long before the ascendancy of e-commerce. For several years now, success has been found mostly at either end of a spectrum. At one end, brands that focus on low prices, dominant assortments, convenient access, and quick and easy purchasing continue to gain share. At the other end of the continuum, upscale, experiential, and more narrowly customer-focused retailers, along with a host of well-honed specialty concepts, are also enjoying improving fortunes.
Stuck in no-man’s-land, swimming in a sea of sameness, are those retailers that offer decent prices, but not the best; an okay shopping experience, but nothing really special; some sales help, but not anything particularly useful. The fact is, even before e-commerce began its rise to prominence, the Sears and JCPenneys of the world were struggling mightily. Their misfortunes were exacerbated by the long-term decline affecting most regional malls.
While it’s easy to blame Amazon for their woes, the reality is that most of their revenue has gone elsewhere: to off-price retailers, discount mass merchants, or dollar stores that offered stronger value and more convenient locations, or to more upscale alternatives that offered a more relevant and differentiated experience.
Sadly, quite a few retailers picked an especially bad time to be boring.
Today’s retail landscape looks a whole lot different than it did three decades ago. In many cases it looks quite different than it did three years ago. In fact, much of the retail industry of the very near future will be almost entirely unrecognizable.
A Brief History of Retail
Civilization may have started out with an emphasis on hunting and gathering, but it wasn’t long before bartering entered the picture. The marketplaces (Roman or otherwise) that were created long ago were no Amazon or Tmall, but they did the job. Just a couple of centuries ago, retail slowly started to become more organized and modern familiar forms of commerce were introduced.
The shift from bartering to the various forms of shopkeeper (the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker) took quite some time. In the nineteenth century, aspects of retail started to become more professionalized, as both specialty stores and department stores made their debut in many major cities in the US, Europe, Japan, and a few other regions.
