The jury is still out on the long-term value of NFTs as a digital ownership model, but SXSW 2022 was steeped in NFT hype. The conference hosted 20+ sessions anchored in serious consideration of the topic, while in another room NFTs of digital art objects were available (to download) for a price. A quick NFT refresher: "A non-fungible token is a blockchain-housed identifier (or piece of individual code) that represents the terms of a smart contract granted upon the exchange of a singular digital object. This object could be a virtual property …
Technology
Retail Playbooks to Win
Winning sports teams have great playbooks. In the age of AI, coaches and teams have access to immense amounts of data, from discovering key insights on plays to understanding every action on the court. This data allows them to evaluate and improve how their team plays the game, all towards reaching the goal of winning. Just as sports teams leverage these digital tools to stay one step ahead of their competition, retailers too can take advantage of these same types of tools to drive their business to succeed. For a store operations manager …
Is Free Shipping Dead?
Everyone knows shipping is costly. Return shipping can be even costlier. In an effort to give consumers what they want, when they want it (aka good consumer service), retailers are running up costs for labor and packaging by shipping one item at a time. This practice may be great optics for the consumer, but it is inefficient, and the excess packaging and energy required for delivery harm the environment and retailers’ bottom lines. This puts retailers between a rock-and-a-hard-place with no clear solution … yet. Consumer expectations and …
SXSW Rises Again
The masked and the unmasked joined forces in Austin after a two-year South by Southwest (SXSW) drought. The sidewalk terror normally caused by the Lime scooter brigades was diminished by smaller crowds overall, yet the conference was surprisingly robust. An array of 15 tracks were staged this year. Retail and fashion didn't earn stand-alone track status but held sway in selected technology and futures talks. Megatrends A few megatrends dominated the conference sessions. I will briefly describe the trend, then consider the implications …
The MetaMall: The Next Big Retail Development Will Be in Cyberspace
Two unrelated events took place 30 years ago in 1992 that altered our world. The first involved Charles M. Stack who started Book Stacks Unlimited, the first online bookstore, selling books via a dial-up bulletin board based in Cleveland. This predates Mr. Bezos’s endeavor by three years. The other curious occurrence taking place that same year was the authorship of a science fiction novel, entitled Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson penned the portmanteau of “meta” and “universe” to create “metaverse,” a word that would become …
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Is This the Beginning of the End for Retail Salespeople?
Forget about factory worker, coal miner and taxi driver jobs being in jeopardy. They are nothing compared to the emerging threat to the jobs of people working in retailing. By most counts there are slightly more than four million people working as retail salespeople and as many as 30 million workers in total in the broader retail sector. But many of those jobs could be gone in the next five to ten years as the business of retailing undergoes one of the most transformative periods in its history with the coming of automated stores and the …
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Climbing the Food Chain in an Ever-Expanding Pet Food Universe
More people adopted pets during the pandemic than ever before, and in a category where humans are championing brands based on their pet’s perceived experiences, positive and abundant online ratings and reviews become critical to capturing new mindshare and building loyalty. …
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Balmain, Barbie and the Blockchain
Barbie may have struggled with math in the 1990s, but now she is minting NFT's and logging some entries to the blockchain. Barbie's latest luxury collaboration is with Balmain, but don't expect to find a decked-out plastic doll in the new Macy's-ified TOYS"R"US. If this Barbie is your desire, Mattel is holding an online auction where you can bid on a digitized one-of-a-kind replicant, with a doll-sized equivalent of the clothes to dress your own Barbie if you place the winning bid. There are three Barbie/NFT items being auctioned. The site …