Doug Stephens

Today, with the meteoric growth of data-centric businesses like Amazon, retailers are now being told that they too must become data companies. Terms like data-centric, data-driven and data-first permeate industry conferences far and wide. Once you understand and begin to design for each moment and micro-moment of your customer’s experience with your brand, you’ll be infinitely more able to prioritize each of these inputs in terms of their importance to that experience. So no, every company is not a data company but rather an experience company that should aim to be proficient in gathering the data required to bring its unique and memorable customer experience to life.

Today this same degree of surveillance is coming to the real world, as brick-and-mortar retailers attempt to fight back against online rivals who use their data supremacy to consistently outpace the growth of their offline competitors. If that’s not Orwellian enough for you, consider that technology giant Adobe recently launched a cloud-based platform that, by using a variety of data points and technologies, identifies individual shoppers in real-time as they enter a store, portraying them as moving dots on a store map. In fact, according to a 2014 patent filing, the company intends to use its growing vortex of customer data to begin what it calls “anticipatory shipping,” a complex predictive analytics and logistics system that will enable Amazon to accurately ship us products before we even know we wanted or needed them. And if all this weren’t enough, in his description of his company’s “store of the future” or “augmented retail” initiative, Farfetch founder José Neves describes a world where individual shoppers are “recognised as [they] come into the store, which is either via beacons or via a wallet like your Apple Wallet, scanning in

We kicked off 2019 at NRF in New York City where we met with retailers and brands eager to understand the challenges they’re up against. The best part was meeting and speaking with you: retailers, store managers, brands and tech providers who are all forging ahead into 2019 navigating the retail landscape that is changing at rapid speeds. As consumer expectations shift and physical stores become a lot more like digital stores, Doug asks if personalized service and recommendations are worth having our physical presence tracked. Doug sat down with Retail Dive’s Corrine Ruff to chat about the 8 key trends retailers and brands should be aware of for 2019.

It was at this point that I made the comment that contrary to popular thinking I believed Millennials don’t suffer from shortened attention spans. The quote was captured by my fellow analyst Andrew Busby and circulated on Twitter and within a few minutes was already prompting responses ranging from those who concurred to those who expressed disgust at the mere notion that anyone in the retail industry should feel obligated to tailor the way we do business to such an “entitled” and accommodated generation. At the most basic level one can’t deny that Millennials are a post-internet generation that has inherited a retail landscape that was built in and for a pre-internet world. And yet we scoff when they say they’d like stores that are Instagram-able and social in nature, when in truth it’s what we all want and what the industry desperately needs