For years our industry has been talking about the power and promise of location data.  Understanding the real world behavior patterns of a brand’s current and prospective customers enables more efficient targeting, more effective messaging, and (of course) the ability to measure whether a campaign actually had the desired effect of driving people to stores.  

That promise changed a bit over the past year and a half as the pandemic dramatically altered the way people socialized, traveled, and shopped, and the idea of leveraging location to target “in the moment shoppers” or report on the change in visit behavior became less relevant.  Cuebiq and other location intelligence companies quickly pivoted to support efforts by government entities, academic institutions, and news organizations to analyze and navigate the spread of the pandemic.  We also worked with brands to help them understand shelter-in-place, mobility flow, and “social contact” insights as indicators of customers’ likelihood to visit stores or dine at restaurants, and to adjust their strategies accordingly.

How Shopping is Different This Year

Back-to-school season will mark the first real in-person shopping event in more than 18 months.  A survey by Deloitte revealed that parents expect to spend 16% more on back-to-school shopping this year, a drastic increase from the 1-3% growth rate seen in recent years. This won’t just be online—according to the National Retail Federation, 48% of K-12 shoppers will be heading to department stores, 44% to discount stores, 41% to clothing stores, 27% to office supplies stores, and 27% to electronics stores. This back-to-school season will clearly be a success, and though it may seem like those of the past, don’t be fooled—it’s different this year.

It's no secret that a lot has changed as a result of COVID-19. As a recent report from Deloitte puts it, “We saw technological adaptation that would normally have taken years occur in a matter of months. COVID-19’s continued effects will be felt even after the pandemic subsides.”  Business models changed overnight (curbside delivery and “ghost kitchens” to name a few!), and the inability to accurately predict (and plan) challenged every stop along the supply chain.  

The factors causing so much change are ultimately irrelevant—the bottom line is the change has happened. Traditionally, marketers could target a general audience, like people with kids for back-to-school campaigns, because they never had to think about individual (or regional) behaviors based on external factors like a pandemic. The US has always been a complicated network of different ecosystems.  The difference now: approaching key initiatives such as “back-to-school” as a national event with singular messaging and tactics is demonstrably inefficient at best and a guaranteed recipe for failure at worst.  

How Location Data Can Help

With the realization that individual communities are behaving vastly differently from one another comes the recognition that location as a data point is uniquely positioned to help brands make better decisions across the organization.  Real-time analysis of how people are moving around can indicate a “return to normal” mindset and willingness to “physically” engage with a brand. General mobility coupled with category and competitive visit trends, can help inform site-planning, product tests and offers, and marketing strategies.  

If leveraged properly, location can help individual brands understand their current and prospective customers better, and action more effectively as a result.  Think of it as the bridge between analysis and activation enabling regionalized strategy and activation previously thought of as inefficient by national advertisers spending big money on big reach.  

Contact us to learn more about how you can leverage location data.

The post Location Data in a Post-Pandemic World: How Back-to-School Is Challenging Us to Think Differently appeared first on Cuebiq.

There are a few ways that brick-and-mortar has always differentiated itself—all of which are centered around maintaining a strong customer experience. Brick-and-mortar stores allow customers to physically interact with the product, benefit from face-to-face customer service, go shopping last-minute, and engage with your unique, in-store brand experience.

Over the last two years, the retail industry has been turned on its head. The pandemic has accelerated trends that were already on their way to becoming cemented in society, such as the shift away from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce. In 2019, over 9,300 brick-and-mortar stores shuttered their doors — and this was well before the pandemic. Forced to pivot in order to survive, retailers have had to think creatively about how to engage customers.

Capitalizing on Digital To Improve Brick-and-Mortar Locations 

For retailers, identifying synergies between their digital and physical presence has been essential to improving the customer experience. For example, many more stores are enabling customers to place orders online and pick up their orders curbside.

Communicating effectively to customers is also key. Retailers can improve the customer experience and also derive more value from their stores by offering customers guidance and promotions on how best to use store locations. For example, retailers can suggest customers buy the same item at a store nearby instead of ordering it online, to save money on shipping. Or, retailers can promote a benefit of visiting their store, such as customers’ being able to try on two similar items side-by-side that they were perusing online, so they don’t have to make returns.

Competing With E-Commerce via Tech

Some of these retail tactics will likely persist well after the pandemic and become normalized, as they cater to the one thing every consumer seeks: convenience. According to Coresight Research, COVID-19 spurred top retailers to pivot, ramping up their e-commerce engines and looking for growth opportunities online instead of on the mall floor. One success story was with Best Buy, which achieved 81% sales retention months after the COVID-19 virus hit, even though most of its stores were closed.

Ironically, the pandemic could be what saves retail from the so-called “retailpocalypse,” as it is forcing those slow adopters of tech to get on board, or risk going bankrupt. By implementing tech-enabled processes and creating a seamless online-to-offline customer experience, retailers stand a chance at competing with e-commerce powerhouses such as Amazon.

Predicting Customer Behavior With Location Data

One surefire way retailers can compete with the likes of Amazon is by integrating location data into their tech stack. With location data, retailers can understand how customers are behaving in the real world. Are they visiting a shoe store after viewing a targeted ad on Instagram? Are their visitation patterns to grocery stores higher or lower than last month? These are some of the questions location data can answer, which can inform retailers’ marketing activations.

Location data can go one step further by enabling retailers to predict customer behavior. According to a study Cuebiq did with 451 Research, 85% of retailers said they wanted to use location data to predict customer behavior. At a time when each incremental store visit or online transaction really counts, being able to predict customer behavior matters.

Want to learn more about how retailers can predict customer behavior? Connect with our team.

The post The Retail Revolution: How the Pandemic Has Changed the Game appeared first on Cuebiq.

As the all-important holiday season approaches once again, retailers are faced with figuring out how to deliver the best cross-channel advertising experiences possible and improve ROI. Despite the pandemic, statistics confirm that traditional retail still has a lot to offer — according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, in the 2018 holiday shopping season, 93% of shoppers went to a physical store.

The key is to understand how to bridge the gap between consumers’ offline and online activity — often called “bricks and clicks.” Continue reading for four key reasons why brick-and-mortar will continue to be successful and how you can capitalize on connecting bricks and clicks during the upcoming shopping season.

Key Benefits of Brick-And-Mortar Retail

1. The Ability to Touch and Feel Merchandise

It happens far too often that you order something online, and when it arrives, it isn’t anything like what you imagined. That’s why it is still extremely important to customers to be able to touch and feel what they’re purchasing before they spend the money. According to Deloitte’s annual holiday retail survey, 60% of respondents said the main reason they visited physical stores was that it gave them the “ability to interact with the product.” 

2. Customer Service

Compared to an online search, an in-store salesperson can give far more personalized assistance and offer more relevant options to the customer. The salespeople know what inventory is available, where the best deals are, and even which new products the customer might have missed. Great customer service is critical to the consumer’s impression of your store and overall brand. A friendly, helpful face can attract and retain customers. 

3. Timing

Even if you don’t tend to procrastinate when it comes to preparing for the holidays, we’ve all accidentally left some shopping until the last minute. Even as more companies invest in next-day delivery, shipping costs can be high, and sometimes you just can’t wait. A physical store provides you with what you’re looking for without the wait, and in the modern market, convenience is key. 

4. Unique Experience

Retailers have caught on to what really differentiates brick-and-mortar from digital: a unique, in-store, brand experience. Entertaining your customers will keep them lingering in your store longer, which means a more memorable experience for them and a reason to return. These experiences are often centered around testing out the product or being Instagram-friendly so that customers will share their photos online. A unique experience convinces them that your brand is worth their investment, and nearly 40 percent of weekly online shoppers say they would visit a pop-up store for an in-person retail experience. 

How Location Data Can Help Close the Loop

It is extremely important to understand your audience and pinpoint what makes brick-and-mortar valuable. With offline consumer insights, you can close the loop on the consumer journey and measure the impact of your marketing efforts across multiple channels. The ultimate goal here is a successful integration of bricks and clicks, which all starts with choosing the right offline intelligence platforms to understand what is actually driving consumers to your store.

Retailers who eagerly incorporate location data are excelling. Offline intelligence can be used to organize and execute the most efficient marketing campaigns to drive in-store visits. Retailers can use analytics and offline measurement to easily measure if their new unique experience and related advertising are having an impact on store visits.

“That’s Cuebiq’s specialty: to help you take advantage of the offline consumer journey, so you can deliver better cross-channel advertising experiences, prove ROI, and maximize ROAS with our attribution tools,” says Valentina Marastoni-Bieser, EVP of Marketing here at Cuebiq.

Successful retailers have transitioned their business and are taking advantage of location data in order to compete and thrive in today’s market. For more insights on the strengths of brick-and-mortar and the most important aspects of leveraging location data to attract customers, be sure to check out our white paper.

The post Last-Minute Shoppers and Location Data: What’s Differentiating Brick-And-Mortar This Shopping Season appeared first on Cuebiq.

As a retailer, you’re probably well aware that Amazon Prime Day is quickly approaching. And you're probably fed up with hearing about how Amazon has monopolized back-to-school season with Prime Day, stealing more and more market share from brick-and-mortar retailers over the last few years.

But what if we told you that you could actually benefit from Prime Day, if you played your cards right? Read on to learn what you could do differently this year to actually capitalize on the success of Prime Day — which you can apply to your marketing efforts to outsmart Amazon.

Understand the New Back-to-School Paradigm

Before you can start strategizing on how to outsmart Amazon, however, it’s important to understand how they completely changed back-to-school season with Prime Day. By creating a one-day shopping promotion during the second week in July — that sold over 100 million products last year (according to eMarketer) — Amazon has effectively hijacked back-to-school season and moved it up to July. And it makes sense, right — if consumers can get insane deals online in July, why would they wait until August or September to get traditional back-to-school deals from brick-and-mortar retailers?

As follows, it’s important for retail marketers to acknowledge that Amazon Prime Day is the new back-to-school kick-off point. And in fact, 84% of retailers surveyed by RetailMeNot believe back-to-school shopping began on or before Prime Day last year… but now they need to capitalize on this knowledge.

Run Deals Relative to Prime Day

Instead of letting Amazon Prime Day hinder them, retailers should use the day to their advantage to increase back-to-school sales. There are three main ways retailers can run deals relative to Prime Day:

1. Target shoppers in the weeks leading up to Prime Day
2. Target shoppers actively shopping on Prime Day 
3. Target shoppers who may have missed Prime Day with deals once it’s over

Several savvy retailers have capitalized on one or more of these strategies to ride the waves of Prime Day.

• Macy’s promoted “Black Friday in July” for the entire week last year, offering massive deals both in-store and online, plus free shipping.
• Kohl’s held a one-day sale event ahead of Prime Day, called “It’s A Big Deal.”
• Target offered discounts on Prime Day itself, emphasizing that there’s “no membership required” to benefit from their various deals, in direct opposition to Amazon Prime.

With proper planning, retailers can take full advantage of Prime Day and offer consumers not only great deals, but also a strong user experience that Amazon may not always be able to provide.

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Invest in New Technology

Once you’ve determined the timeline for when you’d like to run deals relative to Prime Day, you need to make sure you’re maximizing those marketing strategies. One way to do so is by investing in new technology.

By leveraging new data sets, you can target consumers based on their profile, measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, and then optimize them in-flight. For example, you can leverage offline intelligence to strategize and execute more efficient, better-performing marketing campaigns that drive in-store visits.

You can also use offline intelligence to increase brand loyalty — a metric that many retailers cite along with customer engagement as key to measuring success. If retailers can capitalize on new data sets, they will be able to leverage consumer insights for more effective loyalty programs, better co-branding initiatives, and evaluating new partnerships. To find out more about how offline intelligence can help retail marketers, check out our white paper.

As retailers look to capture market share and compete with Amazon for back-to-school season, they must invest in technology that will help them enhance their marketing campaigns. At the end of the day, if they don’t make their marketing campaigns count, they will be left behind.

The post How Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Can Reap the Benefits of Amazon Prime Day for Back-to-School Season appeared first on Cuebiq.

This article was written before Cuebiq deprecated our SDK, which you can learn more about in this blog. We've left the following information up as it may offer offer additional insights and context.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are doing everything in their power to win over consumers as they go head-to-head with e-commerce brands. It’s no secret that e-commerce brands have access to a treasure trove of data about their consumers, which many brick-and-mortar retail organizations lack. In order to compete with these online brands, traditional retailers are seeking additional sources of data.

Location intelligence is a key data source retailers should consider using. Through location data, they can understand how long consumers spend in stores and how often they frequent them, to paint a better picture of the offline consumer journey. In fact, our white paper with 451 Research reveals that 81% of retailers say location data has been “very important” in improving their marketing performance.

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Yet location intelligence does not only help the marketing department within a retail organization — it helps many other entities including media and agency partners, retail operations and strategy, inventory and merchandise, distribution, and sales and business development. Below, we’ve outlined the many ways location intelligence can enhance different departments within a retail organization, helping with everything from improving customer experiences to increasing revenue.

Corporate Marketing:

Let’s start with perhaps the most evident department for location data application: corporate marketing. From strengthening acquisition to developing better consumer experiences, location data enables retail marketers to map the complete offline consumer journey.

Co-Branding + Sponsorship Opportunities

Location analytics enable marketers to analyze offline consumer behaviors such as visitation patterns and purchase intent. This information is critical to help marketers evaluate new partnership opportunities, as they can see which other brands their consumers have an affinity toward and identify co-branding opportunities that resonate with their target audience.

Loyalty Program Development

Marketers can enhance their loyalty programs and and segmentation strategies with knowledge of consumer cross-shopping activities such as brand affinity, visit frequency, dwell time, and more.

Consumer Persona Building

In order to build more effective buyer personas, marketers can use location intelligence to gain a deeper understanding of offline consumer behaviors such as brand affinity and loyalty. This information can also inform their greater marketing strategies and communication efforts.

Competitive Intelligence

By analyzing consumer footfall, marketers can improve their conquesting and day-parting communication efforts. Ultimately, this can help them grow market share and marketing ROI.

CEM Analysis

Leveraging SDK technology within their app enables retail marketers to better understand their app users and their offline behaviors such as brand loyalty, visit frequency, dwell time, and more.

Media / Agency Partners:

Location data can also support a retail organization’s media and agency partners, by providing them with data-driven and consumer-centric insights to inform media decisions and investments.

Strategic Planning

Media and agency partners can leverage location intelligence to identify and test new audiences and media planning strategies. This in turn can help them evaluate their publishers, creative messaging, content platforms, media mix, and cross-channel investments.

Audience Targeting

These partners can also use location data to map consumers’ offline journey and path to purchase, which can improve audience targeting. Location intelligence reveals a number of new audience segments available for activation, such as geo-behavioral audiences, branded audiences, predictive audiences, and seasonal audiences.

Cross-Channel Spend Optimization

In order to optimize media spend by creative, publisher, and geo for campaigns that are already in-flight, media and agency partners can leverage real-time, daily visit, and uplift metrics.

Cross-Channel Measurement

Finally, media and agency partners can prove media ROI by measuring their cross-channel advertising performance in digital, TV, OOH, and radio.

Download Infographic

Retail Operations & Strategy:

For the operations and strategy teams, location intelligence offers accelerated growth and reduced costs — by optimizing operations with real-time, data-driven decisions.

Store Planning

Location intelligence enables operations and strategy professionals to develop custom trade area analysis based on offline consumer behaviors and visitation patterns. Not only does this help with site planning and store closure forecasting, but it also helps with measuring the impact of new competitive store openings at the DMA level.

Revenue Forecasting

The operations and strategy team can also leverage real-time consumer footfall data to forecast brand sales, revenue, foot traffic, visitation trends, and more.

Inventory / Merchandise

Location data provides real-time insights and enhanced data modeling that can help inventory and merchandise teams strengthen their resource management.

Technology Investment Analysis

These teams can use location data to measure the impact of their in-store tech investment in terms of consumer visits, dwell time, and more.

Inventory / Product Management

They can also use real-time data to predict in-store visits, which can help with managing retail stock and boosting cost efficiencies.

Allocation Planning

Finally, location data yields historical as well as real-time data, which can help inventory and merchandise teams plan for future changes such as store openings and closings, business shifts, and promotional events

Distribution

Real-time location intelligence can help distribution departments improve inventory and general distribution strategies.

Enhance Supply Chain

By overlaying offline analytics and insights into their in-house tools or data models, distribution professionals can improve planning, product development, logistics, and much more.

Distribution Partnerships

Location intelligence can also help distribution teams identify merchants to test their new products in the market or find distribution partners to generate more revenue.

Sales / Business Development:

Location intelligence can help sales and business development departments turn relationships and business opportunities into revenue, by layering data intelligence into every deal.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Business development teams can leverage location data to support nonprofit organizations and universities in their efforts to drive innovation around the globe, by solving real-world problems such as natural disaster evacuation planning.

Customer Acquisition

By analyzing offline consumer behaviors to see if they overlap with their enterprise or a similar enterprise, sales teams can better qualify prospects.

CRM Enhancement

Finally, sales and business development teams can boost their customer tool or database with offline behaviors and purchase intent to more accurately predict and generate revenue.

To learn more about how Cuebiq’s location intelligence solutions can help a retail organization, be sure to check out our infographic.

The post How Location Intelligence Can Enhance the Retail Organization at Every Level appeared first on Cuebiq.

If you’re a retailer, Amazon is probably on your mind 24/7. The e-commerce giant has increasingly been stealing market share from traditional retailers, and there’s been a lot of rhetoric about the so-called “retail apocalypse” in recent years. But before you start to panic, we have some positive news to share.

While retailers who refuse to align with new consumer behaviors are struggling, those retailers who eagerly incorporate digital technology and understand new consumer preferences are excelling. To this end, there are three key ways retailers can transform their stores to compete with Amazon in the digital age.

1. Launch New Store Concepts

Retailers are seeing major success by experimenting with new store concepts to increase foot traffic. For example, American Eagle debuted a new concept store dubbed AE Studio in November 2017, which offers many innovative and interactive features. From providing in-store garment and jean personalization, to an on-site social media team, to free laundry machines available for consumers to use while shopping, American Eagle has made AE Studio a true “destination” for consumers, not just a store.

With American Eagle reporting its 14th consecutive quarter of same-store sales growth last week, it’s safe to say that the retailer has effectively made the transition into the digital age. It is adapting to change and playing to its strengths, merging online with offline strategies.

For example, American Eagle’s Aerie brand produced a 30% sales gain last quarter from online business — and the company has plans to capitalize on Aerie’s success by increasing its number of physical locations as well, with 50 to 80 store openings planned for next year.

Cuebiq’s own data reinforces American Eagle’s success compared to competitors in terms of foot traffic for Q4 2017.

• When compared to a competitive set including Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Gap, H&M, and Old Navy, American Eagle had the highest share of visits to its stores, at 23.87%.
• When broken down by day of week, American Eagle still beat out the competition in terms of share of visits, with its highest foot traffic on Fridays and Saturdays.

2. Improve the In-Store Experience

Creating a seamless in-store experience is crucial for brands to compete with Amazon, both on speed and ease of shopping. Only those retailers that are able to understand new consumer expectations and cater to them will be able to survive.

Target, for example, has done a fantastic job of improving the in-store shopping experience. The company rolled out a number of new technologies to improve the customer experience, such as improved self-checkout and  major upgrades to its network infrastructure that more than doubled Wi-Fi bandwidth to its stores.

Target is successfully catering to new consumer expectations through a mix of other strategies as well. From remodeling stores, to cutting prices, to opening more smaller-format stores on college campuses, to focusing on fresh groceries to drive traffic, Target has deftly adapted to new consumer preferences.

These changes had a major effect on the bottom line for Target. Last week, the company reported its best quarterly comparable sales in 13 years, and customer visits to stores picked up to their fastest pace in 10 years.

3. Use Data to Drive Foot Traffic

Another major reason certain brick-and-mortar stores are reporting strong earnings is that they are using data to drive foot traffic. No longer can the offline world exist in a vacuum — to compete with Amazon, traditional retailers must use online data to inform their offline strategies.

For example, Walmart has effectively done this by acquiring e-commerce brand Jet.com, putting itself in direct competition with Amazon. By acquiring Jet, Walmart gained access to a plethora of online insights about its consumers that it can use to inform decisions about user experience in physical stores, such as consumer pain points and preferences.

Many of these user experience improvements have come in the form of new technology implementation. From enlisting robots to restock shelves to automating the process of unloading trucks and sorting inventory, Walmart has made a lot of in-store changes that improve the efficiency of their operations and user experience overall.

By creating effective in-store experiences and using data to continually improve them, brick-and-mortar retailers not only can compete with Amazon — they can reach unprecedented levels of success, themselves.

The post 3 Ways Retailers Can Transform Their Stores to Compete With Amazon in the Digital Age appeared first on Cuebiq.

With 2018 in full swing, retail brands are actively developing and deploying their strategies to get consumers in-store and through the checkout line.  Understanding the challenges that the industry is facing, but also the immense opportunity that lies ahead for those retailers who are able to effectively engage and satisfy their target consumers, we worked with our partner GasBuddy to analyze consumer visits and footfall trends at retail and dining locations throughout 2017, to provide actionable insights  and consumer behavior forecast for the year to come.

Our recommendations for leveraging footfall trends:

• Your in-store experience matters.

  Footfall trends paint a clear picture: stores, like Ricker’s, who have been able to take the store experience to the next level compared to competitors, capture the top spot.  Bottom line, the friendlier and more engaging the store experience, the highest you’ll rank in consumers hearts - and wallets.

• Leverage visitation insights to plan ahead.

  When looking at C-store category visit trends, our analysis revealed that Fridays at 12:00 pm saw the highest average levels of foot traffic throughout 2017. Lunch hours were the busiest during the work week, and the morning commute was comparatively slower.  Layering insights derived from day and time visitation patterns to your proprietary data will give you an enhanced planning tool - from product promotions to inventory, personnel shifts, and more.

• The connection you are looking for might lie beyond store boundaries.

  Understanding your consumers’ offline interests is a powerful tool to help create a meaningful connection with them.  For example, our analysis looked at GasBuddy’s anonymous user patterns beyond gas station and c-store trips and found that McDonald's narrowly edged out Subway to become GasBuddies' favorite quick-service restaurant of 2017, and Starbucks took the title over Dunkin' Donuts in the coffee shop category. Some holiday weekends were popular times to shop and dine out, but others were comparatively slow. GasBuddies rushed to retailers on Thanksgiving weekend to leverage post-holiday sales, but many chose to stay home during Christmas.

Want to learn more about our findings? Download our study here.

The post How Retail Brands Can Leverage Footfall Trends for Strategic Planning appeared first on Cuebiq.

Earlier this week, I attended the third installment of Adweek and Bloomberg Media's ongoing Breakfast Series, Marketing in an Interruptive World. The event featured insights on the retail industry from Bloomberg's Intelligence sector as well as a panel of brand & marketing experts tackling the art of creating human connections. It was a very enlightening breakfast with some amazing intel on the consumer journey which led me to believe that the retail apocalypse we've all been hearing about...might not be so apocalyptic.

Avoiding the Retail Apocalypse

Not all in the retail industry are hurting according to Poonam Goyal, a Consumer Retail Analyst from Bloomberg Intelligence. While apparel and department stores have seen a sharp decline in recent years, there is hope on the horizon as consumer confidence remains high. As Goyal puts it, "Consumers are still spending; what’s different is how people seek out value – and how much they value experiences over things."

Adapting to New Consumer Behaviors

Technology, automation and personalization are shaping the future of retail by adapting to new consumer behaviors - the old brick and mortar business model is now a thing of the past. As we look to the future, we can already see brands and retailers leveraging new technologies and experiences to attract customers.

This week it was announced that Lord & Taylor agreed to start selling merchandise on Walmart.com - setting up what they call a premium fashion destination. While this move may seem odd to some, the pairing of these brands makes sense in today's economy. Consumers are looking for new experiences and now Walmart customers can purchase high-end premium fashion alongside their groceries and home needs.

Enhancing the In-Store Experience

Retailers are also experimenting with new store concepts to boost foot traffic by offering new in-store experiences. Nordstrom Local has unveiled their new concept store which is merchandise free and focused on consumer services like alterations, tailoring, beauty and style consulting. The idea is to create a high value and unforgettable customer experience. Customers at Nordstrom Local can seamlessly order merchandise in-store that is delivered the same day while they are enjoying a salad or getting their nails done.

American Eagle is another great example of store innovation - recently they opted to put laundry machines into some of their stores to attract Millenial consumers. So as their customers shop for a new pair of jeans, they can now do their laundry. This new concept ties back to what matters most in today's economy and that is the experience.

Not only are brands changing their store concepts but they are leveraging new technology to get the product into stores faster. Instead of waiting for the normal 4-6 months for new products, brands like Zara make it a priority to get a new product every 2 weeks! As Goyal puts it, "That’s the future of retail – the consumer is changing, and you have to change with them, it’s about being able to move as fast as customers do.” Brands like Zara do this by investing in new technology and automation allowing them to keep up with consumer's changing behaviors.

Technology, Automation and Personalization

The old business model employed by brick and mortar brands must be forgotten. Consumer habits and behaviors are changing at a very fast pace due to new technology and the availability of goods. It's up to brands to make that change and deliver new experiences to their customers. Through technology, automation and personalization - retailers now have the ability to take huge leaps that were never before possible.

I've heard that we've have moved from an industrial economy to a connection economy where the new currency is attention. According to Goyal, "Competing today is about connecting with the customer,” she said. “Emotionally, through your marketing, and through product.” That sounds about right to me...

For a full recap on the insights from Marketing in an Interruptive World - please click here.

For more industry news and insights from the Cuebiq team, visit our News & Events page.

The post Adapting to the Future of Retail: Adjusting to New Consumer Behaviors appeared first on Cuebiq.