NRF 2015: Get Back To The (New) Basics

By Matt Pillar, senior executive editor, Innovative Retail Technologies

Every December for the past fourteen years, I’ve engaged in a task that’s both time-honored tradition and self-torture. I’ve entered my press credentials for the annual NRF Big Show, submitted the requisite registration information, and with a smiling wince, hit the submit button.

Within minutes, I begin receiving requests for show appointments from several hundred of the 600+ vendors exhibiting there.

Many are friends and acquaintances I look forward to visiting with and learning from in the most electric atmosphere on the convention scene. But the wince is learned behavior. Among the meeting requests I field are dozens of invitations from startup companies peddling magical technologies that promise to revolutionize retail. These invitations often include the word “disruptive” in the headline, and that much I can’t deny.

A word of warning to the tech decision makers attending this month’s convention and expo: Many of the vendors on the NRF show floor will fulfill their promise of disruption. That is to say, if you’re taken by their oh-so-shiny sales pitches—and if those sales pitches detract from your focus on the basic blocking-and-tackling of modern-day retailing—you will experience disruption. In fact, you might just disrupt yourself out of a job.

I’m not implying that sophisticated retailers aren’t ready for, or won’t benefit from, interactive dressing room technologies, holographic digital signage, or the teleportation of inventory to thwart sales lost to out-of-stocks. If you’ve already mastered channel integration at the inventory and customer levels, if you’re enjoying the double-digit sales lift proven achievable from mobile POS and clienteling adoption, and if you’ve developed unbreakable bonds with customers via mobile marketing, I say go for it. Put a little bling on your tech stack and go for it.

I’m betting, though, that you haven’t come anywhere close to mastery of channel integration. I know you haven’t optimized mobile POS and clienteling, because most of you haven’t even implemented it yet. And because you haven’t mastered inventory management in a multi-channel world, you can’t possibly claim execution of a truly “optimized” mobile marketing strategy.

There are a lot of stats that support my contentions.

• Inventory management: In its recent report titled Omni-Channel Retail 2014: Double Trouble, RSR found that 93 percent of retailers rated system-wide inventory visibility as the most significant capability in executing their omni-channel fulfillment strategy, yet only 45 percent have enabled it.
   
• Mobile POS/Clienteling: IHL and others keep telling us that mobile POS shipments are going gangbusters, but consumer research from CFI Group tells us that just 27 percent of consumers have been on the receiving end of assistance from mobile technology-wielding retail associates. Retailers can’t just order mobile devices, they need to deploy them.
   
• Mobile Marketing: CFI Group also found that 70 percent of consumers have made a purchase on their smartphones in the last six months, up from 59 percent a year ago. M-commerce is arguably the hottest opportunity in retail, but the omni-channel inventory visibility and fulfillment challenges cited in the first bullet above tell us that marketing via mobile is dangerously premature.

The point of all this is simple. As you plot your NRF schedule, prepare to be dazzled, but don’t be disrupted. Stay focused and walk the show floor with a few extra doses of pragmatism in your attendee bag. There’s plenty of work to do before it’s time to deliver apparel to dressing rooms by robot and to homes by drone.