A Look Back At '09, Strategy For '10

Hang on, folks; only a few more weeks until we're singing "Auld Lang Syne," though I'm sure more than a few of us will be a little off-key at the expense of (cheap) champagne. It was a tough year, but if you haven't been driven out of business or fallen prey to a debilitating state of alcohol abuse as a result, there's cause for optimism in 2010. This report gives us pause to first reminisce a while on what went wrong in 2009 before reflecting on the technology and operations strategies that will pull us from the rubble in 2010.

It's The Economy, Stupid
James Carville said it best during the '92 presidential election, when he coined the above phrase in response to a question on the key issue in the presidential debate.

Obvious statement: Dismal performance in the retail sector in 2009 has been a direct result of economic fallout. That's what went wrong in 2009. But what's separated survivors from big losers has been, in most cases, the strategy deployed in the midst of recessionary turmoil. The first half of this special report examines what — beyond the obvious —went wrong this year in retail. Respondents shared frank comments and hard data on the failures of their 2009 operational strategies (and the failings of their peers), and we uncovered trends that help clarify what worked and what did not.

The second half of the report details what our subscribers plan to invest in throughout 2010 as they endeavor a return to healthy sales and profits.

Separating the two halves of the report is commentary by expert industry watcher Sahir Anand, research director at Aberdeen Group.

Survey Methodology
With help from Penn State University, we designed a Webbased survey and pushed it out to our subscribers and users of retailsolutionsonline.com throughout the month of September. We asked three sets of questions: multiple choice questions that gauged retailers' operational and technological response to economic conditions; open-ended questions designed to gather opinions from retailers on the worst mistakes they and their peers and competitors made this year; and finally, multiple-choice questions about what technology and operations solutions they'll deploy in 2010 to right the ship.

It was our intention to publish a report that neither chastised nor praised specific brands or individuals from the retail or vendor communities.

Upon learning what systems and technologies our subscribers planned to invest in throughout 2010, we did decide to serve as a resource to them by publishing a list of vendor solutions providers in each category. Every effort was made to make these lists as fair and comprehensive as our knowledge and networks allowed.

In all, we gathered responses from 385 individual retail executives, spanning the industry in terms of size and category. We eliminated several ballots that could not be verified as retailers.

In determining "what went wrong," we asked respondents to what extent they agreed or disagreed with a series of positive statements (e.g. "My company has maintained adequate staff levels") in an effort to gauge their confidence in the decisions they and their companies made in 2009. Topics ranged from merchandise-level maintenance to systems integration to workforce management and several points between.

These questions were followed by a series of open-ended questions asking retail executives for specifics on what they, their peers, and their competitors did wrong this year. We made our determination of "what went wrong" by simply measuring the rate at which retailers disagreed with positive performance statements and identifying common trends in the responses to our open-ended questions.

To determine "what's going right," we simply asked retailers what their investment plans looked like for 2010, asking them to choose spending priorities from a comprehensive list of 36 options, divided by discipline into six categories.

The three top-scoring options in each category were deemed "best investments for 2010," and comprehensive lists of providers of those solutions were created.

Stats aside, we gathered some colorful commentary that we've included throughout the report on the following pages. We hope you find this data helpful and use it as a resource for your own 2010 planning.

If you have questions or comments regarding our findings, please give me a call or send me an email at matt.pillar@jamesonpublishing.com.