Retailers + Brands and Consumers + Shoppers = it’s love, maybe a 1-sided love affair, but it is there since forever.

Retailers and Brands cannot live in a world where consumers and shoppers do not exist, thus they need to take good care of them and fall in love with them every day and grow this love just to keep them coming their way because they are their only raison-d’être to open their stores every morning.

The retailers BIG Data should consider in the overall perspective:
_ Forecast & Replenishment Demand
_ Historical Purchases
_ Seasonality of Products and Events
_ Local & National Events
_ National and International Holidays
_ Strikes (if any)
_ Promotions & Their Effect
_ Weather Effect

Then in the more personalized part of the love affair with its clientèle:
_ The Store Location
_ The Neighborhood
_ Its Customers & Shoppers Profiles
_ The Surrounding Competition
_ Some Other Specifics

Reading Recommendation
SMALL DATA by Martin Lindstrom

Hired by the world’s leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends three hundred nights a year overseas, closely observing people in their homes. His goal: to uncover their hidden desires and turn them into breakthrough products for the world’s leading brands. In a world besotted by the power of Big Data, he works like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, accumulating small clues to help solve a stunningly diverse array of challenges. Lindstrom connects the dots in this globe-trotting narrative that will fascinate not only marketers and brand managers, but anyone interested in the infinite variations of human behavior.

Small Data combines armchair travel with forensic psychology into an interlocking series of international clue-gathering detective stories. It presents a rare behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create global brands, and along the way, reveals surprising and counterintuitive truths about what connects us all as humans.

Lately, the death of retail as we know it is everywhere on the internet. Big brands disappearing overnight, stores shutting down by dozens daily, malls becoming ghost towns and everybody is pointing at the internet being the reason behind this.

Well, I am a big believer of brick-and-mortar retail and no matter how big the internet and Amazon.com will get, in my opinion retail is here to stay but conditionally.

If retailers want to live, they need and should innovate. The beauty of brick-and-mortar retail is the flexibility.

The flexibility of changing what is not working, finding new ways to make their stores better and more attractive, spending more time on their shoppers behavior, re-engineering their concepts, analyzing their data, adapting new communications channels, taking a step back and looking at the wider picture of the situation and correct things.

It is not true that the internet is killing the retail when the internet retailers are opening physical shops. This simply means the actual business model of the retailers is not working anymore and they need change.

Change is not easy, especially for the old school retailers. with large, very large stores, hundreds of employees on the floor, endless aisles and a heavy machine to operate. The new retail business model should be lean to survive, with a very lean structure just to quickly adapt to changes, move on and live a happy retail life.