Data for Good

Professional data collection, evaluation, and transparency are the key principles that LSTNR offers its partners as a service. Data for Good and other digital community technologies are intended to assist retailers in the urgently required transformation to connected Retail-as-a-Service.

LSTNR DATA FOR GOOD

Hakan Temür of LSTNR outlines the absurdity of customers having to buy back their own data from platforms in order to reach their community. The concept of making one’s individual data accessible to all – and even sharing it – to create transparency and become more efficient and sustainable, was the underlying motivation for his LSTNR retail innovation hub.

Text: Isabel Faiss. Photos: LSTNR

What were and are your underlying motives

for radically questioning the laws of retail? And what does LSTNR implement?

After 25 years of experience in B2B brand management for fashion and lifestyle brands, as well as 10 years in the B2C retail sector, I decided in 2019 to dovetail both sets of expertise and realign them as a commerce and experience space. Early in 2020, we then sought to launch a digital framework that would allow us to make everything that is currently possible in terms of technology and data protection measurable, coupled with innovative services. The cornerstone of these services is Retailas-a-Service. But then the pandemic came along, and we could not launch as scheduled. Instead, we implemented the framework on a plug-and-play basis in our existing concept store, The Listener, in Frankfurt to provide conceptual proof. To this end, we defined different areas in which to test these technologies to allow our partners to manage their merchandise and their sales performance in real time, as well as interact with us directly.

What is your role in this?

As a service supplier, we provide the space, our community, our professional consultants as storytellers, and additional support. In addition, we continually test and develop various experience concepts, ranging from live broadcasting and content creation to possible gamification approaches featuring VR and AR experiences. For that purpose, we constantly observe which digital solutions are already available on the market that would be predestined for retailers to interact digitally. We do not develop everything in-house, but activate the relevant specialist partners, bring them on board, and present the results here. Our goal is to take our own store to the next level while inviting other brands to test their prototypes and experiment in this space – always in a highly efficient and measurable format.

Your thesis suggests that retailers will no longer own inventory in the future. How will retail work then?

The future of retail no longer revolves around buying goods. We are utterly convinced of that. To some extent,

online stores are already exclusively offering concession merchandise. This means that the platform in question earns less margin in sales, makes its community available, and the goods remain property of the brands. On the other hand, this approach minimises stock risks. This concept will prevail, not least because brands desire direct access to consumers – and technology makes that possible. The community a retailer builds based on its concept becomes crucial in this context, because this community is an asset that brands want to tap into via a partnership. Brands would, of course, ideally prefer to attract customers to their own platform within a direct-to-consumer model. Retailers like us are something of an activator to provide brands with this access and to share our community. The question is, however, what relevance do partners retain once communities have been exhausted? What happens then? Does that mean we need to keep acquiring new brands in order to share our communities with? The subject is extremely complex and there is no blueprint yet. The Listener is the laboratory in which we test different topics of this new ecosystem in order to pass on our findings within the market.

What does this involve in practice?

We strive to make the described framework broader and more experiential by presenting the topics hospitality, mental health, and future foods, as well as everything related to urban trends such as urban living and mobility, in the context of a studio for content creation and broadcasting. On this stage, the participating brands are relaunched and introduced to our customers in a manner that allows for real-time evaluation of the process. New floor space needs to be experience space, because the margin-based business and commissions will no longer be among the monetisation options for retailers. The future lies in a service package consisting of space rental, subscriptions, additional support, software, or staff allocation. Some excellent concepts already exist, such as Showfields in New York, Blaenk in Cologne, Vaund in Hannover, or The Latest in Berlin. These different players in individual focus areas are all united by the Retail-as-aService model. However, it is impossible to cover all the future retail areas without adequate technology, the proper software, and the corresponding mindset. The ultimate goal is always to provide a robust proof of concept, and to be able to scale an approach from within The Listener. Our digital framework enables everything, regardless of whether you plug in a display, a sensory box, or a gaming tool. Our concept can be set up anywhere, be it at a trade show, in a pop-up store, or in a tent. The Listener has, so to speak, opened up a new front and created an initial foundation for jointly developing new solutions by drawing up model projects that we make available to our community transparently.

Keyword gamification. Where do you think this particular field is heading?

I believe the way forward is to put together a whole package consisting of digital design, virtual showroom, smart supply on demand, digital traceability, and maximum transparency of all stakeholders as a digital seal of quality for brands, retailers, and products. The future is measured in digital currency. Everything is digital, as everything has a digital footprint. This requires us to make the entire value chain of products and services sufficiently transparent to ensure this transparency can lead to a kind of “scoring” within the corresponding community.

“We want to be the platform on which everyone can utilise plug-and-play features to obtain expertise, data, and transparent expert knowledge and test their prototypes, both physically and

in the cloud.” – Hakan Temür, LSTNR

“Game over, old retail! Welcome, new world!” was the title of a shop window campaign that cross-referenced The Listener’s new alignment.