Ten years and counting!

March 2009, when I decided to start my blog “An Indian and A Retailer”, has definitely become a defining moment in my life journey. Ten years and 1,00,000 plus views later, the blog still continues to attract regular readers who often use its contents as a reference with regard to Indian Retail.

The blog started off as a simple repository of my experiences and learning in the Indian Retail space. It went on to become the foundation stone of my journey as an author. This blog led to my first book “The INDIAN reTALEs”. That was followed by “Out Of Syllabus”, “BREAK FREE” and the latest one, “The Ultimate Guide to SMART SHOPPING”. This has been in addition to the various articles I have written for leading business publications. 

All these must total up to approximately four lakh plus words over the years.

A BIG THANK YOU to all my readers who found my writing to be of interest and use. Many of them have given private feedback as also written public reviews. 

Two anecdotes are worth sharing as part of this milestone.

The first is about the actual start of my journey in writing. In 2000 after I had returned from the UK after completing the Chevening Scholarship, Business Line invited me to write an article. This was to be about my stint at ASDA and was titled “Making an elephant dance”. The article detailed the interesting practices that were followed at ASDA to keep their large number of employees engaged and nimble footed to remain customer centric. The blog, in a manner of speaking continued from where this article had led me in the journey of being an author.

The second one is about the name for my blog. It was a challenge as I was conflicted by various ideas and options. The final decision was influenced by using the two identities that I am most proud of and has defined me as a person. 

An Indian; growing up in the pre-liberalization period and witnessing the contribution that an individual can make as an ordinary citizen of India has always been motivating to me. Post liberalization, this has only been reinforced. In spite of several options to pursue a career abroad, the appeal of being an Indian contributing to the country’s growth in whatever small way possible has held greater appeal for me.

A Retailer; is how I think and operate. The experiences from this sector have defined my outlook and continue to do so. I am immensely grateful that God led me into this sector and am thankful to all my mentors who have taught me about the various facets about retail.

One of the topics I have written extensively about is that the retail sector in India should be granted industry status. This would not only spur this sector to faster and better growth but also contribute significantly to the Indian economy. My fond wish and hope as “An Indian and A Retailer”, is that this happens soon. I hope that the industry status is granted and a comprehensive policy for this sector, including both offline and online retailers gets rolled out at the earliest. 

That would be fantastic and something to look forward to.

Future of Retail; Bringing the store to you

Google Glasses coupled with 3D printing opened up a whole new dimension of shopping. I had written about this and a blue sky idea was that people might move away from purchasing products to buying 3D print designs and make their own products at home. This is very much a possibility in the future when the materials and composites required for various kinds of 3D printed products as also 3D printers become main stream and a part of most homes.

In the meantime there is another interesting technology which might merge the physical and online retail worlds to give you the best of both.

Shoppers opt for eTailing because of price, convenience and range. The competitive advantage of convenience is coupled by the fact that online retail is not constrained by physical store size. This enables them to offer a far wider and deeper range, called as a long tail of merchandise.

Shoppers also take the trouble of going to physical stores in order to browse and have a shopping experience which consists of “Touch, Feel and See”.

Imagine a scenario where you want to shop for a new dress and you sit back in your recliner and the store actually comes to you and enables you to shop. Is that not a fantastic combination of physical and online retail? 

Is that possible?

There are emerging technologies which enable visualization which has led to innovations like virtual dressing rooms. However, a new technology when coupled with visualization might actually bring the shop to you in the near future.

Microsoft has been working on a technology called HoloLens. 

Very simply put, this creates a 3 dimensional holographic view for the viewer and they can interact with the same. This video would give you a better idea about HoloLens.

How is this relevant and applicable to retail?

Retailers can leverage this platform to create 3 dimensional stores which can be accessed by the shopper in the comfort of their home. Creating such 3D stores is already possible and being used for a different purpose. Today there are several IT solutions that create a 3 dimensional rendering of the store and make is quite realistic. See the first video to get an idea about how 3D store would look like and the second video to see how Carrefour has used Google Street View to create a virtual shopping experience using kiosks and hand held devices. 

The logical next step would be to project this as a 3D immersive hologram in the coming years.

Combine these technologies and it would be possible to bring home the store. Add on technologies which are being worked on like delivering sensory influences such as smell and a feel of touch. Voila, your store will be as real as it can be and more importantly, exclusive to you.

In such a scenario, if you want to buy a new dress you might sit back and slip on your HoloLens device or some other similar device and the store comes alive before you. You can browse, use visualization to try on dresses, check out accessories, compare prices and much more.

As compared to printing products at home, bringing the store home seems much closer to reality. This is all the more pertinent in the current context where both physical and online retailers realize the need to be present on both platforms. A giant like Amazon has opened physical stores and several physicals stores are in the online space.

Bringing a store home is now possible and a retailer who gets their act together to make this happen might establish a strong competitive advantage, especially in India.

Buying Sales, Hundred million at a time!

“Buying Sales” is not necessarily a bad thing unless one does it without having a clear idea about why it is being done. So, what is buying sale?

It is a term used to define very deep discounts and/ or killer deals which will by default lead to very high sales which usually also results in a loss of margins. In effect the Retailer then spends a lot of money to generate that sales, hence the term; “Buying Sales”.

This approach will obviously require deep pockets and unless there is a clear agenda for the same, it ends up as being a waste since it is not easily sustainable.

The recent hype about a eTailer’s one day sale and the resultant deluge of shopper angst coupled with the statements by the eTailer expressing happiness and satisfaction from this promotion makes me wonder about the contradiction. What was the reason and logic for this activity? Were they “Buying Sales” and if so, was it done with an objective?

These questions and also what can be the expected impact of this on eTailing and the other players have been captured in an article published in ET Retail. Click here to read the full article.

Picture Courtesy - www.gpxgroup.com

Joining the bandwagon

A few days ago I was quite surprised to see this advertisements for a fairly well known silk saree shop which has several outlets in the city. End Of Season Sale (EOSS) is by now a familiar sight in the Indian Retailscape with lifestyle stores screaming offers of up to 50% or even 70% Off.

This seems to be actually a new trend and is worth watching out for – Start Of Season Sale (SOSS) or is it a sign of desperation and this actually means Save Our Store Sales (SOSS)!

Some key elements which are worth debating about;

• The festival season kicks off with Navratri/ Dushera and extends all the way till Diwali. This is the time for large spikes in sales, especially in the apparel segment and silk sarees would definitely qualify. Why should the Retailer have such aggressive Buy One Get One Free offers along with some very steep discounts also.
• If the intent is to clear stocks, then their pitch of updated collection is misleading and is actually bound to create a negative impact in the shopper’s mind set if that is not true. This category is very high on the impact of word of mouth and such misleading information will soon spread the negative message.
• If the range is indeed updated and has new designs for the festive season, why this aggressive offer? This segment sells based more on design, colour, quality and service. In that context, why is the Retailer making it into a mass merchandise?

Too often nowadays I find Retailers who opt for the easy way out of “Buying Sales”. This means that they have offers and promotions which have no long term or even medium strategy and usually the only objective is to increase sales with no perspective about the cost of getting such sales. Which is why I have used the terms “Save Our Store Sales” (SOSS). Such offers invariably lead to conditioning the customers to start waiting out the Retailer till they offer such promotions and very soon the Retailer is forced to make this into a regular occurrence.

On the other hand, this might be a very canny Retailer who is starting off a new trend of Start of Season Sales and will try to capture a larger share of the customers festival spends in this category. However, even in such a situation the long term impact is not very positive and it is bound to become a compulsive habit not only for that Retailer but for that segment as a whole.

Apart from the EOSS trend there are two examples to validate the fact that these trends can very soon lead to a repetitive habit forming pattern. The first is the year end sale in the CDIT stores which was started by a Chennai based Retailer to beat the low sales during that period and is now a annual occurrence across this segment. The other is the “Aadi Sale” which has a similar background and now has become a default annual affair. Although these occasions are now used to clear old models and excess stocks, am not sure whether this pattern of having some sort of sales for almost half the year is a healthy trend.

Indian Retail & Social Media

When the whole world is going gaga about social media and now people are starting to talk about the possible decline of the same, Indian Retail seems to be watching this trend from the sidelines with some token presence here and there.

Big Data, the next big thing in Analytics has caught everyone’s attention but the root of this lies in being able to connect the dots across various data points of a consumer, especially their behavior and preferences expressed on social media. I wonder how Indian Retail will leverage big data without any meaningful engagement of the shoppers on the various social media platforms.

A recent initiative by a toy store chain led me examine this issue and ET Retail has published a two part article about this. 

Click here to read Part 1 which examines this in detail.

Click here to read Part 2 which is prescriptive and outlines some of the basic steps that are required to engage the shoppers on social media platforms.

In summary, the core thought is that social media needs to become an integral part of the Retailer’s strategy and cannot be limited to SEO efforts only.

Image courtesy - slashgear.com 

Retail Idea - Managing your shopper’s waiting state

A recent idea implemented by PepsiCo at a London bus stop got me thinking about the similarity with regard to a person’s waiting state between the situation at a bus stop and in a store; namely the waiting at checkout counters.

Shoppers and Retailers alike do not like the billing counters. Shoppers hate to wait for the check out and Retailers dread all the potential issues that arise out of a long checkout line. Most shoppers have reconciled themselves to this pain even if they crib and complain about it. Sure, there are some who leave their baskets and trolleys behind when faced with a long line and that is a loss of sales to the store. Retailers are constantly investing in technology to overcome this pain point with self check out, mobile check out, etc. Yet, this remains one of the biggest areas of shopper distress especially in physical, mass merchandise stores.

This is a classic example of a shopper’s waiting state. However, there are many other instances where a shopper is made to wait and in several cases the Retailer might not even be aware of the resultant resentment building up inside the shopper and/or those accompanying the shopper.

Identifying, understanding and addressing any such waiting state of the shopper is a crucial building block in delivering overall customer satisfaction. 

Let me discuss about the biggest pain of them all, the checkout line in this article and will move on to other instances of the shopper’s waiting state, in subsequent posts.

As mentioned earlier retailers have introduced self scanning, self checkout, mobile billing, etc., to try and reduce the waiting time at the billing counter. However, this is not a problem that can be completely resolved because of a simple logistics issue. The cost of manpower and technology required to handle the peak crowd of shoppers would be idle for a majority of time because shoppers tend to follow the 80:20 principle. 80 percent of them would end up shopping in the evenings and at weekends which creates an obvious load on the infrastructure and leads to bottle necks.

Self check outs are gaining ground although the shoppers are equally divided between hailing it as the best thing as compared to deriding it as a bigger problem than manned checkout stations. Therefore, let us leave this topic and address the core issue with regard to the shopper’s waiting state at the checkout.

At a very basic level, when any person is waiting they can be distracted from the monotony of waiting or their waiting can be reduced or removed. Solutions like the self check out, etc., address the elimination or reduction of this waiting state. However, as I mentioned, there is a logistic constraint in being able to eliminate this completely.

So, the other solution is to distract the shopper from their waiting. Many retailers have tried installing televisions near the billing counters to try and distract the shoppers from waiting but I do not think that this has worked very well. One key constraint is with regard to content which might not be interesting enough and the other is the presence of advertising as Retailers tend to see this as a revenue generating source more than a solution to manage the shopper’s waiting state.

When I saw this video about what PepsiCo had done at a London bus stop, it struck me as a potentially WOW solution to distract shoppers and hence manage their waiting state.

This is an interesting use of augmented reality and the display helps to completely engage the viewer as you can see in the video. Now imagine such screens placed near the checkout counters of your supermarkets and other crowded stores. The chances that you will be distracted sufficiently enough to be oblivious of the waiting state are quite high.

However, this is subject to the content and if that is not engaging, for how many repeat visits would this solution last?

That is where the Retailer should engage in a triangular Win-Win-Win arrangement which would help manage their shoppers as also deliver value to everyone concerned. One such potential agreement could be with the brand as also a major movie house.

The brand installs these screens in the stores which include some interesting and engaging augmented reality displays. The movie house can release augmented reality clips and trailers of their forthcoming movies. Imagine standing in a line to get your purchases billed and you see Shahrukh Khan or Leonardo DiCaprio walking down the line and mouthing a few dialogues or doing some stunts. While a few shoppers might still not be distracted the majority would and that means that their waiting state has been handled positively.

An idea worth bringing into reality!