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Retail’s responsible reset

The six imperatives for retail growth.

The future of retail

With the retail industry in perpetual flux, there’s no rest for the weary. Traditional retailers are vulnerable to disruptors from within and to a barrage of external forces beyond their control. The last thing they should do is hunker down and wait for things to settle. Because they never will.

The challenge (and opportunity) for retailers is to strengthen digital capabilities while fully harnessing the physical model they’ve built over decades. This is a profound transformation that requires a reset of every aspect of the business—people, process and technology. All while navigating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) implications.

What does that mean in practice? We’ve identified six imperatives—consumer offerings, channels, fulfillment, sourcing, talent, and data—that we believe are essential to enable retail success and growth.

It’s time for retailers to demonstrate the resilience and creativity that have been hallmarks of the retail industry for years. Let retail’s responsible reset begin.

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RETAIL’S RESPONSIBLE RESET

Reset consumer offerings

Connect offerings to a retailer’s purpose in consumers’ lives in ways that are authentic to the brand and create new revenue streams.

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Engage consumers with your brand

Retailers need to stay close to consumers by understanding their values, preferences and behaviours as a first step to engaging them with your brand. Use research to find out how retail consumers are thinking, spending and living, and develop products and services to engage and delight them.

RETAIL’S RESPONSIBLE RESET

Reset channels

Take a portfolio approach across digital and physical channels to balance engaging consumers with the cost of operations.

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Embrace the value of the store

The store network offers an advantage over digital-only competitors, but only if retailers continually evolve the purpose, design, and operating model of stores to support a consumer need. The role, number and format of stores should be tailored to the needs of local community to balance reduction in operating costs and investments in new experiences.

RETAIL’S RESPONSIBLE RESET

Reset fulfillment

Activate local fulfillment and make it profitable by using retailers’ assets and/or those available through partnerships.

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Predict and optimize with data

Getting products to consumers has become increasingly costly and complex. Retailers should use intelligent data analytics to predict how best to serve the most profitable, highest value consumers—and keep them coming back.

RETAIL’S RESPONSIBLE RESET

Reset sourcing

Improve resiliency by rethinking the supply base—focusing on the geopolitical climate, surety of supply, sustainability, and transparency.

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Collaborate across the ecosystem

Consumers want transparency, which creates a new value equation for retail—to balance supplier cost against service levels, sustainability and resilience. By treating vendors as true partners, retailers can benefit across the value chain.

RETAIL’S RESPONSIBLE RESET

Reset talent

Develop a compelling value proposition to retain and attract talent while supporting a digitally savvy, data fluent, and diverse workforce and culture.

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Create a future-ready workforce

Retailers need to think how their culture and employee value proposition can be used to retain and attract talent. This includes defining a purpose-driven culture that sustains equity and diversity, where everyone feels they have a chance to thrive.

RETAIL’S RESPONSIBLE RESET

Reset data

Become a truly data-driven retail organization where employees are more than just data-aware—they become data-dependent.

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Focus on the data that matters

Continually making decisions with data at scale and speed—and finding ways to monetize data effectively—requires a significant shift in approach for most retailers. Only a handful of companies have made headway on this journey so far.

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The big read

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Full report: Retail's responsible reset

To thrive in an uncertain future, retailers must reset and reinvent responsibly and get ready for constant change—find out how in our new report.

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