Yesterday, I presented at the Marketing Innovations Summit, an event arranged by Nascom, a highly successful Belgium Digital agency based in the surprisingly creative city of Genk. I was inspired to focus the presentation on a growing bugbear of mine; the ineffective nature of today’s retail experience. As you know, I wrote about retail back in January in this article and I railed about the ways retailers try to drive us insane with their endless addiction to price slashing while killing us with ugly stores, lack of stock and unfriendly sales assistants. And then appropriately flagged the Apple Store and Build-A-Bear as two examples of what retailers should be doing.
Well, for their event, Nascom asked me to create a challenging presentation, so I thought I would explore the real failings of retail further and, more importantly, find some possible fixes. Not only did I find concrete data and examples showing just how bad US and UK retail is doing economically, but also some great examples of what some stores and brands are doing to try to make retail better using new technologies and approaches.
You can check out the entire presentation here, complete with speaker and case notes.
