THE CONSUMER’S RELATIONSHIP WITH RETAIL & TECH

By Anne Marie Soto, Retail Marketing Society

advocates. They’re their brand advocates and they’re also often their consumers. And that they have to provide a path to career potential. Not everybody has to have a career in retail, but I think that there’s a focus on that.”

“There’s also acknowledgement,” she continued, “that you need people who are better trained; they’re going to use tech to train. There could be less people, but they’ll be better people and they’re people who will better engage with the consumer and better do the tasks that retail is asking them to do, which is new and different in 2023 versus 2017-2019.”

Technology

Technology that interacts with shoppers as part of their in-store experience is now a winning play. These technologies, however, must align with the customers’ needs and desires. Technologies that resonate with their target markets promote deeper customer engagement and excitement.

“At ICR,” said Baum, “we heard a lot about customization and personalization. It extended not just in terms of what you’re offering the customer but also in terms of targeted marketing. Some of the technologies that were talked about were how to get more out of your email [and] the personalization in terms of acquiring customers. It was pretty clear that the acquisition cost of the new customer has skyrocketed, particularly since there have been some limitations on what you can use personal information for. That definitely is a game changer.”

Unique Value Proposition

“Hyper personalization and preemptive distribution are the keys to delivering customers the precise products they want. We define that as localization,” said Hodges. As examples, he cited Whole Foods, with Marie’s Beauty Cream from Brooklyn and Dan’s Asparagus from New

Jersey. “If you go to Williamsburg,” he continued, “you’ll see where the future of retails will be four years from now, which is the right-sized Nike store, the right-sized Hermes store.”

The Metaverse’s Relationship With Physical Retail

Kniffen reported that the current take is that “selling in the Metaverse is, so far, a joke. Gamers will buy game stuff with real world money but, inside the game, they won’t buy real world stuff with real world money to be delivered to a real world house. Everybody believes that will start to change in 2023 and you’ll be able to dress your avatar in something and you buy a matching outfit for yourself. That’s a little too much like being an American Girl doll and having the real apparel that you wear with it. So it has to get better than that. But retailers that I talked to at NRF believe that once a person sees something interesting in the Metaverse, you have to allow them to buy that something, not just buy it to put on an avatar inside the Metaverse.”

In a retail setting, the Metaverse is entertainment. Hodges offered a number of examples, including Westfield Century City, the Garden State Plaza, the Warner Metaverse and Harry Potter in New York City. The experience is a creatively done version of the Metaverse rather than a technically done version.

“Once you’ve actually experienced it,” Hodges explained, “then you can actually imagine how it works. But it’s not a technical discussion, it’s a creative discussion in my opinion. So, in order to talk about the Metaverse, you must first go to the Metaverse.”

Anne Marie Soto Retail Marketing Society

Tel: (201) 692-8087 www.retailmarketingsociety.org