What is the biggest challenge faced by the retailers and merchant aggregators today?
Covid-19 has accelerated adoption to digital and non-contact channels, shifted demand to small and local retailers, and changed the way we work and study. These are not temporary changes. And every one of these impacts retail and retail real estate.
It’s time for retailers to examine their relevance in the post Covid world and re-invent themselves to provide a unified experience, across physical and digital channels.
Driving relevant traffic has always been a big challenge for retailers. Retailers went where their customers were – by setting up stores in the right catchments – high streets and malls. And now is the time for them to understand where their customers are in the digital world and take their stores to the digital ‘catchments’.
How can they make use of technology to help themselves in this day and age where everything is digital?
Retailers have data – plenty of it. They need to use technology to put it together and enable personalization for every customer – in real time and at scale. Doing so will help them do three things:
- drive relevant customer traffic.
- deliver a seamless journey across both digital and physical channels
- drive conversion.
I talked about digital catchments and pools of customers earlier. Technology allows retailers and aggregators to be part of larger ecosystems and marketplaces – they must explore these models with large enterprises like banks, since they can drive much higher returns.
In your opinion, what makes a Crayon, a Crayon?
In my opinion, there are four defining traits that make a Crayon:
- Comfort with ambiguity. Which allows Crayons to pivot when things around them change rapidly
- Intellectual curiosity. The ability to question status quo – and reshape things while holding steady to our North Star
- Tenacity and resilience. The ability to bend but not break
- The ability to take charge and run things on their own
