Let’s shift our gaze from the current moment where an undercurrent of uncertainty colors everything. It is easy to feel like we are treading water both professionally and personally, but if we look outward, things are changing at a rapid pace. As I have heard repeatedly in recent weeks, this pandemic has accelerated shifts that were already underway and/or, a decade’s worth of change has rained down on our society in fewer than six months. One area where this is especially true is the integration of voice-activated smart speakers into our …
Facebook Shops Is a Winner – but for Whom?
In a recent Facebook live stream, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s latest foray into e-commerce retail. Zuckerberg described Shops as, “The biggest step we have taken yet [in social commerce].” This time Facebook is playing for keeps. Origin Story In August 2019, Facebook pulled rank on its two highly coveted holdings, Instagram and WhatsApp. The tech community howled about brand dilution of the wildly popular apps, and Instagram devotees held their collective noses when the titles of the apps were changed to Instagram from Facebook and …
The Great Reopening?
The great American closing was straightforward. Stores, restaurants, and the bulk of the economy switched to sleep mode; waking up will be a different matter. The shape of this phase of post-Covid retail is now unfolding. Other countries are well into the reopening and offer us models to consider. Additionally, innovators, driven by opportunity and a problem-solving culture have been rushing potential solutions to market. And finally, for VR, an existing technology that has been awaiting wide-spread adoption, the moment may have …
We Like Big Tech Again
We are all living in a time warp as our collective confinement continues, but let’s reminisce back to Q1 2020. In January, California residents gained the right to wrestle back their user data from the tech platforms, retailers, and any other companies that had captured and exploited it. In February, Senator Josh Hawley posited that the FTC take over Google, and Senator Amy Klobuchar introduced an antitrust modernization bill as a cudgel against big tech. The country was speeding toward a new era where the big technology companies would be …
Preparing for Recovery
As the clouds of COVID-19 darken, they are eclipsing our ability to see a clear future. The initial shock of the economic, employment and retail collapse has been intellectually and somewhat emotionally absorbed, but rather than the impact dissipating, it has morphed into palpable anxiety that is seeping into our organizations. We want to have the answers for the future, but this is a time to get comfortable with the now, and our inability to predict outcomes for the foreseeable future. As we are functioning in a situation without historical …
Eco Policy Gets Mainstreamed
We like our decade benchmarks. In 1961, JFK had his end-of-the-decade moonshot. Now after a stretch of corporate shoulder shrugging and lip service, CEO after CEO is announcing bold sustainability initiatives with 2030 as the North Star. Al Gore, the sustainability siren, stayed true to his message at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. Also, at Davos was Greta Thunberg a voice of the future consumer, demanding action on climate change to her global business audience. Perhaps Thunberg, with the weight of that future consumer behind …
NRF 2020: It’s a New Decade and We’ve Finally Put the Retail Apocalypse to Bed
In early January, the global retail tribe marched past the Hudson Yards' towers, the Vessel, The Shed and construction cranes to cloister themselves in the Javits Center for the 2020 iteration of the annual retail mecca, the NRF Big Show. It appears that 20/20 proved too tempting an analogy for many copywriters to resist. The session titles implied a crystal-clear vision of the future of retail as the new decade unfolds. In actuality, the show reviewed and previewed the state of retail, displayed a mind-numbing array of available retail-tech …
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Reflections of a Trade War Correspondent
In the words of New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman, "At this point I've lost count of how many times markets have rallied in the belief that Trump was winding down his trade war, only to face announcements that a much-anticipated deal wasn't happening or that tariffs were being slapped on a new set of products or countries." While this could be the genesis of a new drinking game, the current tariff tumult, which it appears has reached a truce, is hardly entertaining for procurement officers who are trying to strategize around the shifting …