Digiday: Bad Retail is Dead

Retail Briefing: ‘Bad retail is dead’

Retailers are facing a turning point: Sharpen up your data chops, or drop out.

As customers command more influence in retailers’ decision making today, these companies have to increasingly up the ante in order to succeed. Tools that were considered the business of tech startups not long ago, like AI, are now edging toward table stakes as retailers look to build out roadmaps that are shaped by customer demand. At NRF’s Shop.org conference in Las Vegas last week, conversation, both onstage and off, surrounded “smarter retail” strategies and tactics, including personalization, machine learning, predictive inventory buying, offline and online data analysis, responsive design processes and supply chains, localization and more.

“Retail isn’t dead. Bad retail is dead,” said CVS Pharmacy president Kevin Hourican onstage on Friday. Hourican laid out how every new development made at CVS is in some way in response to what customers have told the retailer they wanted. To turn analysis into action, CVS has mined data touch points, like how people flow through a store, what they’re buying in physical locations, and what they’re ordering through the mobile app. A few recent changes to CVS’s business include a new beauty department, next-day and same-day delivery and a push to make pharmacy processes more efficient with partner Aetna.  ... "