WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

The grocery retail industry plays a critical role in these uncertain times. Here are six actions food retailers should take to help their communities, their employees, and their business.

The membership program will feature unlimited grocery deliveries, and perhaps other perks like discounts on gas and prescription drugs.

In this report, we dive into Stripe’s unique strategy, growth trajectory, product set, and where the $35B payments giant sees the global online commerce market heading next.

Key findings: 

- Funding to retail tech companies slowed in 2019. 
- Retail tech deals shifted toward later stages. 
- Companies in Asian countries are winning more deals.
- Among the unicorns born in 2019, 31 were retail tech companies

- In-store retail technology investment grew significantly in 2019.
- Funding to e-commerce companies and related technologies declined in 2019.
- Deals to new retail formats also slowed in 2019.
- Funding to supply chain & logistics tech continued to rise.
- Deals to on-demand businesses slipped slightly.
- Online grocery and broader food delivery deals declined.
- Funding for artificial intelligence (AI) companies working across retail tech functions accelerated in 2019.

When Google researchers presented a deep bidirectional Transformer model that addresses 11 NLP tasks and surpassed even human performance in the challenging area of question answering, it was seen as a game-changer in NLP/NLU.

A list of retail bankruptcies from 2015 to today. Retail is at an inflection point as they face struggling physical storefronts, massive debt, and inefficient operations.

What the Amazon founder and CEO wants for his empire and himself, and what that means for the rest of us.

Brands and retailers are moving quickly to provide more seamless omnichannel shopping experiences--but your customers are moving faster.

One former employee claims it’s one of the most expensive research and development projects in the company’s history, though Kumar disputes that, saying the stores use off-the-shelf hardware and Amazon’s existing cloud computing infrastructure. Still, considering the dense placement of cameras and sensors, and the tech-support crews that are on call at all hours of the week, it’s much more expensive than running, say, a 7-Eleven, which could be staffed by a single cashier and—with the possible exception of the Slurpee machine—have little in the way of bespoke technology.

As the retail industry continues to be disrupted by emerging technologies and shifting consumer behavior, how do you keep up? One of the first steps is to keep up to date with the latest innovations and trends that will transform how you start, market, manage, and grow your business in 2019 and beyond.

We’ve put together a list of our favorite retail blogs on the internet and outlined the subjects each of them covers. We’ve selected blogs based on their industry expertise, the volume of content they publish, and how actionable their content is.

The 15 best retail blogs that every retailer needs to add to their reading list. Convince and convert. Retail Dive. Insider Trends. Retail Wire. Harvard Business Review. TechCrunch. Lightspeed Blog. The Retail Doctor. The National Retail Federation. Medallion Retail. Forrester Retail. Hubspot Blog. Retail Design Blog. Neil Patel Blog.

The retail industry is rewriting the laws of physics. Change is coming at an ever faster rate each year and 2030 will be upon us before we know it. Explore the world in 2030 and the future of retail 2030.  

Brick-and-mortar retail stores need to up their game. Technology could give them significant boost.

The move to Manhattan comes at a time when many other retailers have been experimenting with pint-sized locations in urban areas. Target has opened a few small-format shops within New York and has one planned down the street from Ikea’s new store. Macy’s is trimming back some of its real estate, including testing out pop-up marketplaces at its Herald Square flagship in New York, while Kohl’s is cutting up its stores to bring in new tenants like Aldi and Planet Fitness. Many companies are thinking small.

They indicate that consumers' mobile phones will soon become remote controls for the commercial exploration of the physical world, or, better said, they will become tools to unlock Easter eggs within shopping experiences that will vary from one individual to the next.

From PSFK's Accelerating Innovation In Retail report, here's how five brands are retaining valuable consumer feedback by giving selected members exclusive access to new products and services.

“We chose right from the very start to not hide the technology,” Hanrahan explained.

La problématique à laquelle nous faisions face était de savoir comment améliorer l’expérience client tout en créant un moment privilégié entre les vendeurs et les clients. De ce fait, grâce au cintre connecté, le vendeur deviendra davantage un conseiller stylistique et le client pourra immédiatement consulter les tailles disponibles, le prix et essayer un vêtement qui lui sera directement amené en cabine.

According to Marketplace Pulse research, Amazon-owned private label brands are not nearly as successful as many paint them to be. Amazon has been successful in creating generic items at low prices, but only when using the Amazon brand name (i.e., AmazonBasics and Amazon Essentials). Otherwise, the hundreds of brands and tens of thousands of products launched are not resonating with customers.
On the surface, Amazon is utilizing its knowledge of its powerful retail machine to steer shoppers toward its in-house brands and away from its competitors. The goal of this research was to check if this was true. To validate if the success of AmazonBasics batteries could be extrapolated to other brands and different categories.
We analyzed over 23,000 products launched by Amazon under more than 400 different brands. Some of those brands are private label brands built by Amazon, and some are exclusive brands made by a third party. All under the “Our Brands” umbrella, a collection of Amazon private brands and a curated selection of brands sold exclusively on Amazon.
According to our research the Amazon-owned Top 10 most successful private label brands, including the likes of AmazonBasics and Pinzon, contribute estimated 81% of the total sales. Amazon added more than 100 brands in 2018, but none of the recent launches are category leaders. Amazon has attracted much attention with every new brand they launched, however the assumption that every new brand will be as impactful as AmazonBasics is unfounded. It is Quantity vs. Quality - AmazonBasics represents less than 5% of products launched, but more than 57% of sales.

In China, the either-or retail equation is being cast aside for New Retail, which merges the best of the in-store and online experiences. To Alibaba, success these days also means helping brands go omnichannel. An increasing number of brands are doing just that, tapping Alibaba’s New Retail tools, erasing the lines between online and offline. 

The key to New Retail is the mobile phone, which provides the critical connection between online and offline retail to consumers. Brands in China have an advantage here because they don’t need to convince consumers to download and use their apps. That’s because they know 500 million consumers already have the Tmall app. “China is moving much faster than the West in this evolution because the Western retail model is built on legacy systems. China’s model is disruptive,” said Frank Lavin, CEO of ExportNow, a company which helps Western brands sell to China. “China does not have the legacy of malls and big-box stores like the West. China has no traditional retail model to defend.”

The experts predict that AI will outperform humans in the next 10 years in tasks such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high school essays (by 2026), and driving trucks (by 2027).
But many other tasks will take much longer for machines to master. AI won’t be better than humans at working in retail until 2031, able to write a bestselling book until 2049, or capable of working as a surgeon until 2053.

Speed is critical, which means grocers must jettison their traditional—and slow—approach to implementing new initiatives. They should instead take an agile approach using “concept sprints.” Characterized by quick decision making, a focus on tangible outcomes, constant customer validation, colocated and multidisciplinary teams, rapid iteration, and careful attention to internal capability building, concept sprints can reduce time-to-market from four to six months to just four weeks.

Exhibit 5 shows how concept sprints can be used across the organization to accelerate the launch of high-priority initiatives. Leading retailers have used such an approach to introduce new in-store digital solutions, refine picking algorithms in warehouses, or develop new products.