Retail Innovation Week - FUTURE OF RETAIL 2021 | Marian Cuestas

 During the Retail Innovation Week I learned:

1. Resilience is the new state of Retail. If we had to define in one word what the Retail industry has been during the past year, that word would be resilience. That is because every company that survived 2020 had the ability to rapidly respond to the disruption of a pandemic. Even though this characteristic is vital for any kind of business at any given time, last year was especially rough on companies that did not have it. 
2. Adaptability to change is the key to survival. Different current trends within the Retail industry point towards how companies were able to pivot as fast as possible in the middle of theCOVID-19 pandemic. This change had three pillars: Sustained awareness, through developing foundational analytics; Adaptive decision making, through redirecting strategy based on real-time insights; and Modular infrastructure through reorganizing retail channels.
3. E-commerce is the future of Retail. The pandemic was taken as an opportunity to redesign the digital team in many retail companies and build new muscles within the organizations. E-commerce touches every piece of the business, from consumer experience to marketing and sales, that’s why it has gained so much importance within the industry and is one of the places where companies can grow in great ways from now on. 

But companies are also looking into how to improve the e-commerce experience for the consumer as the market goes there inevitably. Janet Galore, Senior UX Manager at Amazon, touched on that and said

 “Mobile for us is where we think the future of online shopping is going and so we’re going to continue to invest there as well as video. Video has become a huge part of how people learn and communicate. It conveys so much so quickly and in an authentic way, in a way that people can connect to, so we’ve been working in better ways for customers to engage with video throughout their whole shopping experience."

This is one brilliant and simple way Amazon is improving their consumer experience and an example to many other online retailers that want to grow.

On a different note, one of the interesting insights discussed during the panel was around Company Culture. Worth Darling, Director of Innovation at Vans, said: 

“Culture is the bedrock for everything a brand does. […] At Vans we have a people-first culture and is the focus on that what has enabled agility and flexibility. Those things are an output of the culture […] and tie together the organizational connectedness."

Ultimately company culture is the tool businesses within this industry use to be able to adapt to the market shifts and keep growing or at least maintaining the brand alive despite the circumstances.

To summarize, the retail industry got hit by the pandemic, but now it is in a place where resilience, the ability to pivot and flexibility are the things that will maintain businesses afloat. Being able to incorporate great e-commerce strategies and experiences for the consumer should also be at the top of the list for retail companies as well as investing in their internal culture to develop values related to adaptability in an organic and solid way.