Adobe Summit EMEA: Evolution Key To Keep Up With Pace of Retail Change

Retailers need to constantly evolve and be nimble if they are to keep pace with the changing landscape of consumer expectations to deliver on experience.

Retailers need to constantly evolve and be nimble if they are to keep pace with the changing landscape of consumer expectations to deliver on experience.

This was the view of speakers in a session at the Adobe Summit EMEA yesterday on “Digital Transformation of Retail: Taking an Experience-First Approach.”

Michael Klein, Adobe’s director, industry strategy and marketing for retail, highlighted the continuing changes in device use as one example. “In mobile, tablet was the second most important device in the customer journey just a couple of years ago, but now we’re seeing a shift to the phone, based on the iPhone 6s effect. In markets such as Japan, Brazil, and China, that shift has already happened.”

For Jack Smith, group digital director at U.K. fashion retailer New Look, this requires a forward-looking approach: “There’s no point building something for today because that’s already yesterday. So we need to look at the context we’ll be operating in, and build for the future.”

Getting traditional retail teams to think digital, however, can be a challenge. “My job is to embed a digital mindset into everyone in the organisation. You need to be clear about what’s going on, and build relationships with trading teams. Being iterative, and delivering change in small, bitesize chunks helps.”

U.K. eyewear retailer Specsavers operates its stores through joint venture partnerships. Facing up to the challenge of digital means building new services that complement and add to the in-store proposition.

When it comes to effective change management, Paul Morris, group ecommerce director at Specsavers, said: “We leverage the partners we have to help us build in digital design, and think through the technology choices we need to make. It’s not about doing it only ourselves.”

Consumer expectations that change more quickly than commerce technology are putting extra pressure on retailers. Dan Barnicle, vice-president of technology strategy and consulting at SapientNitro, said: “The challenge for our clients is how to be nimble when we’re tethered to slow-moving and stable commerce systems. It takes 18 months to re-platform, but that’s too long. Our clients want to be testing in 18 months.”

In response to this, SapientNitro has now developed an experience-led commerce framework that decouples the experience layer from the commerce system and allows retailers to use pre-built templates and components to test and develop the front-end experience.