The Retail Landscape Is Changing — For The Better

December 2013 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Bliss Gordon, retail strategist, Axsium Group

Mobile technologies are driving changes in retail, turning back the clocks to when retailers knew their customers individually.

To try to draw deeper meaning from the recent Integrated Solutions For Retailers 2014 Retail Tech Spending Survey, it’s probably worth stepping back and examining the overarching themes with which retailers are currently wrestling. The prime mover, as always in retail, is the customer, and today’s customer is more knowledgeable, has access to more information, and is willing to connect on a very emotional level with the right retailers.

The obvious challenge for retailers is how to stand out in an increasingly crowded field while maintaining control over the cost of doing business. Broadly, the trends seen in the most recent survey play to a traditional retailer’s strategic strength: its employees. The technology trends that are enabling the retail workforce to do more for the customer can be cast into two distinct but interrelated groups — customer experience and cost leadership.