Trends and Insights from Retail Industry Leaders
We recently put on our annual Market Leaders Forum at Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina. The agenda consisted of a few days of speakers, interesting dialogue, and of course a round of golf on the famed Pinehurst #2. Attendees included executives from industry leaders such as CVS, Novartis, Unilever, Kimberly-Clark, UPS and others. Below are a few insights, trends and observations gleaned from the sessions.
Our speakers for the sessions were fantastic, and represented a cross-section of views on Retail, Globalization and Consumer Marketing. A few of their insights:
Brian Gildenberg, Chief Knowledge Officer at Management Ventures, led off with a focus on trends in the Retail industry. Two of Brian's key points: 1) an increasing focus on localization in the Retail space, and 2) an increased focus on "the facts" - running the retail store environment based on sales insights, rather than forecast and ship data (we're obviously big fans of this second trend, given our strong position in providing "real time" POS from retailers to their suppliers). Brian also pointed to the trend among top retailers to very specifically target specific customer segments via both marketing and in-store product assortments, something CVS and Best Buy, for example, do very well.
Florian Zettlemeyer, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley) followed Brian with a deep dive into some of the incredible things companies like Harrah's are doing with customer loyalty programs (notably, a few weeks later, Harrah's received a buyout offer from a group of private equity firms led by Texas Pacific Group). Using a sophisticated set of programs designed to market to consumers across a variety of properties, Harrah's has successfully driven key metrics like profitability per customer and repeat visits up dramatically. With loyalty programs an increasingly profitable part of leading retailers' operations, Florian's talk was right on the money.
Our third speaker, Navi Radjou from Forrester Research presented a number of compelling views on globalization. One of the most compelling takeways I heard from Navi's talk concerned the way American companies look at markets like India and China. For the past few years, most of the focus has been on these markets as low-cost sources of labor and services. Going forward, however, with the "BRIC" (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries leading population and spending growth on a macro scale, more and more companies are (and should be) looking to these markets as sources of new revenue and customer acquisition.
All in all, it was a great set of sessions led by a diverse set of speakers. And of course, the setting wasn't bad either :)
