Home»» With emerging global competitors and convenient mobile applications increasingly adding competition for retailers, can physical retail stores remain relevant to today’s consumers? Achieving that relevancy is a shared hope for those at Globalshop 2011. More than 500 attendees gathered this morning (March 28) at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas for the annual conference’s sold out opening keynote, presented by Envirosell CEO Paco Underhill, a renowned author, speaker, and shopping anthropologist, who discussed today’s changing battlefield of retail and consumer shopping trends and its subsequent affect on retail stores.
“For those serving the retail and design communities, this has been a very interesting time,” says Underhill, referring that data from a DDI March 2009 report on emerging economic realities stands to be even truer today. “The world of consumption and selling will change more in the next five years than it has in the past decades.”
The recession left all consumers on a budget—no matter their placement on the economic ladder—meaning shoppers are taking more time to do pre-shopping research and have the ability to opt for more convenient and, oftentimes cheaper, purchasing methods. Today’s retailers, according to Underhill, must now change their strategy and learn how to not only navigate these changes and new technologies—such as mobile shopper applications and price comparisons—to distinguish their brand and make the consumer shopping experience not only a functional and efficient process but an integrated model that is able to serve a global market.
“Connectivity has joined Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, probably somewhere between sex and shelter,” Underhill jokes. “We’ve reached the apogee of the ‘big box,” and we can’t grow the store any bigger or get more money out of people’s pockets with our current model.” He stresses that need for retailers to recognize that we cannot go back to what retail used to be—a straight-forward buy and sell model. Instead, “a marriage of research and design is needed. It’s time to stop being afraid of conceptual design and get involved in engaging your customers,” he says.
-- Stacy Straczynski
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