10 Shopper Experience MegaTrends for 2011

By Joe Skorupa

If you listen closely, shoppers will tell you exactly what they need. In a close partnership with Cognizant, we polled 2,427 shoppers in the U.S. and Canada to listen and learn. Then we linked their likes and dislikes to specific strategies retailers can deploy to align with shopper sentiment to improve sales and satisfaction.

The second annual RIS/Cognizant Shopper Experience study, “Taking the Store to the Shopper,” is the result of this unique collaboration. I headed up the RIS part of the project and Steven Skinner, vice president of Cognizant’s retail, hospitality and consumer goods practice, headed up a large team of consultant and analyst in the United States, England and India.

There are a number of surprises and a-ha moments in the study, especially in the area of mobile commerce, which is not yet ready for prime time in the minds of most shoppers even though it is simultaneously one of the fastest growing opportunities in retailing. Clearly, it takes a careful approach by retailers to walk the razor’s edge of these opposing forces.

To find out about this a-ha moment and others, click here to download the complete study.

2011 MegaTrends

In last year’s study Steven Skinner pulled out some key future MegaTrends to watch in 2010. Armed with fresh data, he revisited the suppositions from last year and concluded that six MegaTrends were tracking well and four were still emerging. Here are Skinner’s six MegaTrends that are currently transforming retail.

1. Taking the store to the shopper

Retailers are bringing all of the capabilities of their enterprises to shoppers, regardless of location.

2. Shopper demand for consistent cross-channel experiences drives retailer organizational integration

To create a seamless shopping experience retailers are integrating such departments within their organizations as customer service, merchandising, pricing, inventory and supply chain business processes.

3. Distributed order management integrates retail processes

Retailers are integrating distributed order management across the enterprise to provide one view of customer orders regardless of channel.

4. Social media and product development collide

The product lifecycle management (PLM) process is being integrated with social media feedback to improve product relevance, increase speed to market, and reduce cost associated with products that don’t resonate with target customer segments.

5. Death of the task worker

In order to deal with the dramatic increase in shopper product knowledge, retailers are transforming their employees into a knowledge-based workforce, dramatically increasing customer-facing labor hours and automating back-office tasks in order to drive sales while keeping labor costs at current levels.

6. Generation Y changes behaviors of all other generations

The massive and fast adoption of shopper-friendly technologies forces retailers and other generations to adapt to Generation Y shopping styles.

Here are Skinner’s four MegaTrends that are currently emerging as disruptive forces in retail.

7. Sale and product information via mobile phone

Shoppers will opt into networks that send them content-rich messages about product information, prices, promotions and special services.

8. Mobile shopping (finally) comes of age

Mobile commerce will be fueled by Near Field Communications (NFC), increased network bandwidth and decreased retailer reluctance to make transaction operations virtual.

9. Death of the POS becomes a possibility

Retailers can potentially eliminate the tyranny of future POS investments due to the availability of alternatives for check-out, increasing customer acceptance of out-of-queue check-out, and the cost-benefit of mobile check-out versus static POS.

10. Real SKU rationalization takes hold

Cross-channel order management will enable retailers to rationalize SKU location and move slow turning products into the warehouse or back to suppliers while simultaneously increasing inventory for key items.

What elevates the RIS/Cognizant Shopper Experience study over others in retail technology is that it fills a gap left wide open in most retailer-based research: opinions from those that count most, the shopper. By combining this study’s consumer-based approach with insights drawn from retailer-based sources retail executives can add a new layer of relevance to their IT strategies and achieve a perfect storm of bottom-up and top-down influences.

Some people say retailers are drowning in data, but no one ever says they are drowning in insight. Use this study to complement your other sources of data and you will find the insight you need to succeed.