Tag: Macy’s

Growth · Retail · Store closings

Shrinking To Prosperity: Can Store Closings Save Struggling Retailers?

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It seems as if major store closing announcements are becoming a nearly daily occurrence. Earlier this week Michael Kors, the once high flying accessible luxury brand, announced it would close at least 100 stores over the next two years. They now join the ranks of Payless Shoes, Macy’s, JC Penney and a host of other major players that have recently decided to shutter a significant percentage of their store fleet.

In fact, some retailers are closing all of their stores hoping to thrive as an online only retailer. Bebe, Guess, Wet Seal and The Limited have all chosen to go this route–and it seems like both Sears and Radio Shack are headed there as well; they just haven’t made it official. In any event, if you want follow the action along at home my friends at Fung Global Retail maintain a store closing tracker.

While its clear that more and more struggling retailers are embracing a strategy to get much smaller, this ultimately begs the question whether it’s really possible to shrink your way to greatness.

Take a moment to make a list of brands (don’t worry, I’ll wait) that have intentionally walked away from a significant percentage of their revenue and been successful over the long-term. I’m not talking about conglomerates that have jettisoned under-performers in their portfolio or companies that have exited specific lines of business with challenging profitability. I’m talking about brands that have willingly stopped doing business in major geographies and/or with large numbers of core customers. It’s not easy it?

The truth is that it is far easier to name brands that closed stores merely as an intermediate step on their way to oblivion. Think Blockbuster and Borders (or Bradlee’s for you old timers). And that’s just the B’s. The retail graveyard is chock-a-block with once mighty merchants that spent years closing stores only to eventually succumb to the inevitable.

I have maintained for some time that when retailers start to close a lot of stores the issue is rarely that they have fundamentally too many outlets. Rather it’s that their value proposition is not sufficiently relevant and remarkable for the locations they have. We know that the notion that physical retail is dead is just silly. We know that plenty of “traditional” retailers are opening stores. Ulta, Sephora, Dollar General, Costco come readily to mind. We know that the hottest brands in retail–from giants like Amazon to specialty players like Warby Parker and Bonobo’s– are opening stores. We know that in most cases the economics of physical stores are superior to e-commerce. We know that the combination of digital AND physical is most often what customers want and what yields the best results. We know that it is virtually always the case that when retailers close stores their e-commerce revenues in the vacated trade area go down.

Clearly, on balance, there are too many stores. And for most retailers the size, configuration, operations and many fundamental aspects of the in-store experience must be changed, in some cases radically. Often the “need” to close stores is borne of desperation, propelled by multiple years of management neglect and failure to innovate. Often, as a practical matter, there is no choice, because there is no way to make up for the sins of the past in the here and now. While I cannot definitively say that mass store closings indicate the beginning of a downward spiral, I would definitely reject that notion that they are a panacea. And we absolutely shouldn’t conclude that such moves suggest a sustainable long-term strategy.

Over three years ago I posited that retailers were delusional if they thought that store closings would be their salvation. Today, as the pace of these closings accelerate, I still fundamentally reject the notion that more than a handful of brands can shrink their way to greatness. I hope I’m wrong.

michael-kors-closing-stores

A version of this story recently appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.

Being Remarkable · Innovation · Retail

Macy’s: After Big Earnings Whiff, Here’s What It Needs To Do

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Last week Macy’s missed its revenue and earnings forecast for the first quarter, sending its shares tumbling.

While the talk of a retail apocalypse is just so much hype, the intense waves of digital disruption and shifting consumer preferences assure that the future of retail–and the impact on many large and lumbering players like Macy’s–will not be evenly distributed.

We now live in a digital-first world where the line between brick & mortar sales and e-commerce is mostly a distinction without a difference. Fellow retail analyst Doug Stephens describes this new landscape as “phygital.” But whatever you label it, the consumer’s path to purchase has changed substantially–and with it the role of the store. And, increasingly, same-store sales are a largely irrelevant metric.

Nevertheless, the continuing overall poor performance of Macy’s is concerning and underscores the problems faced by many legacy brands. To get back on track, Macy’s needs to aggressively address several fundamental problems.

  • Eschew the sea of sameness. Macy’s, like so many other retailers, picked a really bad time to be so boring. Redundant, repetitive and fundamentally uninteresting product has become the norm. If customers don’t have a compelling reason (other than price) to traffic either their website or store, Macy’s will continue to hemorrhage market share.
  • It’s the experience stupid! Having remarkable and relevant products is critically important and a necessary foundation, but it’s hardly sufficient. If Macy’s continues to provide me-too visual presentation, marketing that is indistinguishable from every other department store and lackluster customer service they will continue to make price the deciding factor for most consumers.
  • Omni-channel is dead, at least in the way many have been pursuing it. Macy’s spent a lot of time and money trying to be all things to all people. Channel ubiquity with continued mediocrity is pointless. All retailers need to think about how to best harmonize and simplify the shopping across the moments of truth that matter the most for customers. Otherwise we’re just spending a lot of money to move customers between channels, not gaining relevance, share of wallet and profits.
  • Strategically re-imagine the store and the store footprint. Analysts are going to keep pushing Macy’s to close stores. And to be sure, shrinking of both store counts and store size is probably required. But the reason this is even a talking point has much more to do with the weakness of Macy’s value proposition, not their sheer number of stores. Online helps stores and stores help online. Period. Mediocre retailers that close a lot of stores are likely starting a downward spiral from which they will never return. The key is to understand the store as the hub of an ecosystem for the brand, not an asset to be merely fine-tuned for productivity. Focus on being remarkable instead of mediocre and focus on how stores strategically drive online (and vice versa) and the store closing discussion recedes into the background.
  • Don’t start a price war. With pricing pressures from Amazon, outlet stores and all the off-price players there might be a tendency to get overly focused on pricing. But don’t forget, the problem with a price war is you might win.
  • Become a testing machine. It’s easy to blame Amazon for the troubles facing the industry. But by far the biggest reason retailers are in trouble is their abject failure to innovate. Every retailer needs an R&D budget and every retailer needs to test, fail and test again. Retailers were too scared to fail and now their failing because of it. As Seth reminds us “if failure is not an option, than neither is success.”

Of course all of this is more easily said than done, particularly as Wall Street pushes for short-term fixes and Amazon continues to lower its thin margin hammer on most sectors of retail. Yet it’s hard to escape the fact that more of the same at Macy’s will only yield more of the same.

What Macy’s needs is a lot more innovation.

What investors need is just a bit more patience.

A version of this story recently appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.  

Being Remarkable · Innovation · Retail

Retailers picked a really bad time to be so boring

stevenpdennis2 Comments

Perhaps you’ve noticed that things are pretty tough across the retail industry these days?

Competition has never been more fierce. Average unit retail prices are getting compressed, putting ever greater downward pressure on margins. Retailers and developers that overbuilt for years are at long last facing a reckoning. Radical transparency and ease of anytime, anywhere, anyway shopping are hammering those that have failed to innovate and differentiate.

Of course, not so long ago retail brands could get away peddling average products for average people. There was a time when retailers and the brands they sold held most of the cards. There was a time when rapid industry growth could smooth over patches of mediocrity. There was a time when being just a little bit interesting could win the customer’s attention and give retailers a good shot at making the sale.

That time is over. Forever.

Now the customer is very much in charge. Now largely stagnant markets require brands to steal share to have any chance of material top line growth. Now much of retail is drowning in a sea of sameness. Now the consumer is overwhelmed by choices and the battle for share of attention is only won by the weird, the intensely relevant, the remarkable.

And yet….

And yet when entrepreneurs chased force multiplication effectiveness, many legacy brands chose to focus on incremental efficiency gains. While innovative start-ups took risks, the big retailers mostly hunkered down. As a wave of profound change was rippling through the industry, many just decided to watch and study and analyze. But mostly watch. When venture capital was piling into the bold and interesting, much of mainstream retail remained decidedly dull.

There is no shortage of unique, impactful and useful innovations that have emerged from the new age of digital disruption. It’s just that so little of it has come from traditional retailers. At precisely the time that so many retailers desperately need innovation, their cupboards are woefully bare. Confronted by me-too marketing, look-a-like stores, repetitive products and shoddy customer experiences, so many once-proud brands still have next to nothing new, differentiated and exciting to offer.

Today you can take the name off the door and Staples, Office Depot and Office Max are virtually indistinguishable. Same for Macy’s and Dillard’s, Lowe’s and Home Depot. And on and on.

The danger of death by years of inaction, thousands of tiny compromises and clinging to the false notion that a company can shrink to prosperity is now very real. Half measures have availed them nothing. Taking so few risks has turned out to be the riskiest thing retailers could have possibly chosen.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine a worse time to be so boring.

And, ironically, many of these retailers are about to experience a lot of excitement. Just not the fun kind.

Now isn’t that special?

A version of this story recently appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.  

Innovation

The future of retail will not be evenly distributed

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If you follow retail at all you’ve no doubt read multiple recent stories claiming that we are in the midst of a “retail apocalypse.” Like Chicken Little, these journalists and pundits see the sky falling on physical stores and a veritable tsunami of store closings, mall foreclosures and bankruptcies. I imagine they also expect a plague of locusts to descend upon us at any minute, as darkness covers the land.

Of course, this is all nonsense. The reports of traditional retail’s death are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, “greatly exaggerated”–as several of my esteemed colleagues have rightly pointed out. Barring an asteroid hitting Earth, the vast majority of retail will still be done in brick & mortar stores for a long, long time. Most of the major retail brands we know and love will remain household names. Hundred of regional malls will not only survive but continue to do quite well, thank you.

While the disaster scenarios are fake news, one can’t be too sanguine either. Yet, at the other end of the spectrum, we now have an emerging cadre of apocalypse deniers, who counter the claims of the alarmists with their own equally false narrative. Let’s take a look at their most common arguments.

Retail is still growing. This is true, but very misleading. First, the tepid growth in physical retail is not keeping pace with inflation, contributing to a profit squeeze for most players. Second, the main thing that nudges the number into the positive is the concentrated out-sized growth in a few categories, most notably off-price and dollar stores. So the growth in retail is good for a few–and pretty much sucks for everyone else.

Overbuilding of stores is causing a one-time correction. I’d rate this one “true-ish.” The US has been over-stored and over-malled for more than a decade and eventually, the bubble had to burst. But the rationalization and consolidation of commercial real estate go beyond a mere correction, however deep. We are witnessing a fundamental re-structuring of both the number of retail locations and the size and configuration of those boxes. Certainly, a big whack to the stores counts of flagging retailers was (and remains) overdue. And I do expect that the pace of store closings will subside substantially after the first quarter of next year. But anyone who doesn’t see the profound shift is missing the big picture.

Besides lots of new stores are opening. Yes, and this is one of the reasons that physical retail is far from extinct. But–and it’s a big but–while thousands of new stores are opening, they are, almost across the board, much smaller footprints than the stores being shuttered AND they are typically located in very different types of real estate. Hundreds of TJ Maxx and Dollar General stores don’t come close to offsetting the impact of hundreds of Sears, J.C. Penney and Macy’s closings. And while the store openings of  “disruptors” like Bonobos and Warby Parker get a lot of press, not only are their stores tiny, they are very likely to slow their pace substantially unless they can begin to demonstrate profitability.

Malls and retailers are re-inventing themselves with an emphasis on experience. Without question, the most successful malls are reformatting, adding restaurants, theaters, hot specialty formats and other experiential elements to differentiate themselves and drive foot traffic. The problem is bulldozing a mall anchor and/or replacing failed retail tenants with a steak house, juice bar or art show may be smart business for the developer, but it doesn’t necessarily help the retailers that are struggling. As far as retailers themselves, yes, a few are investing in experiential improvements, but for every cool Nike or Apple store there are dozens of retailers that haven’t invested a bit in innovation (or have limited themselves to some gimmicky shiny object that has an immaterial impact on customer relevancy).

The issue is that the future of retail will not be evenly distributed. Far from it.

Even a small shift of spending online (or failure to maintain real growth) can cause a great deleveraging of physical store economics. The closing (or massive re-purposing) of lower quality malls will be highly disruptive to particular major tenants. Online is growing disproportionately, affecting certain categories far more than others. Customers’ continued willingness to trade down and shop for discounts puts greater pressure on retailers with weaker value propositions and poor cost positions. And on and on.

Apocalypse? No.

But the suggestion that most retailers are not seeing their world’s rocked mightily is both misguided and dangerous. Similarly, the blanket notion that the sky is falling on everyone is equally wrong-headed.

Yet the harsh reality is that few retailers will escape unscathed from the seismic changes affecting the industry. Indeed we stand at a precipice. Without radical change and heretofore unseen levels of innovation, many major players are in for a world of hurt.

The clock is ticking. I’d hurry if I were you.

william_ford_gibson

A version of this story recently appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.  

Omni-channel · Retail · Store closings

Wall Street’s Misguided (And Dangerous) Fascination With Retail Store Productivity

stevenpdennis1 Comment

An unprecedented number of retail store locations are closing this year and more announcements are surely coming–though perhaps not quite as many as I suggested in my April Fool’s post.

Given the lack of innovation on the part of traditional retailers, rampant overbuilding and the disruptive nature of e-commerce, this ongoing and massive consolidation of retail space was both inevitable and overdue. Yet much of the way the investor community sees the need for even more aggressive store closings is wrong and, one could argue, pretty dangerous.

One of the more ridiculous ways Wall Street firms have tried to determine the “right” number of store closings is to calculate how many locations would need to be shuttered to return various chains to their 2006 store productivity levels. A somewhat more responsible, though still alarming, analysis comes from Cowen, which focused more on the need to more closely align retail selling space supply and demand.

The most obvious problem with this type of analysis is its focus on ratios. The fact is that many stores with below average productivity are still quite profitable, particularly department stores, given their low rent factors. So while closing a lot of locations may yield a temporary productivity boost it often has a direct and immediate negative impact on earnings, which is a far better indicator of a retailer’s health.

The bigger issue is an underlying misunderstanding of the role of brick & mortar stores in retail’s new world order. Just as “same-store” sales is an increasingly irrelevant metric, so are store productivity numbers. Yes, more stores need to close. Yes, many of the stores that remain need a major rethink with regard to their size and fundamental operations. But what many still fail to grasp is how a retailer’s store footprint drives a brand’s overall health and the success of its e-commerce operations.

A given store’s productivity can be below average and decline yet still contribute to a retailer’s overall success, particularly online. Stores serve as an important–and often low cost–channel to acquire new customers. Stores serve as showrooms that drive customers online. Stores serve as fulfillment points for e-commerce operations. Stores are billboards for a retail brand. Without a compelling store footprint, a brand’s relevance will likely decline and its e-commerce business almost certainly will falter. Stated simply, store productivity numbers, taken in isolation, no longer get at the heart of a brand’s overall performance in an omnichannel world.

While there surely is merit in closing stores that drain cash and management attention, store closings can often make a bad situation worse. Ironically–as Kevin Hillstrom from MineThatData does a great job of illustrating–closings stores to respond to e-commerce growth can actually have the opposite effect. In fact, from my experience, massive store closings often initiate (or at least signal) a coming downward spiral.

Store closings are hardly the panacea that Wall Street seems to believe. And the notion that a brand can shrink its way to prosperity is typically horribly misguided. Macy’s, J.C. Penney and a host of others need to close more stores. And Sears and Kmart just need to go away. But, as I’ve said many times before, show me a retailer that is closing a lot of stores and you’ve likely shown me a retailer that doesn’t have too many stores, but a retail brand that is no longer relevant enough for the stores it has.

The danger of closing too many stores is increasingly real. The danger that struggling retailers will continue to appease Wall Street’s thirst for taking an ax to store counts instead of working on the underlying fault in their stores seems, sadly, clear and present.

A version of this story recently appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.  

Customer-centric · Digital · e-commerce · Retail

‘Same-store sales’ is retail’s increasingly irrelevant metric

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The retail industry has used “same-store sales” (or “comparable store sales”) as a key indicator of a retailer’s health for decades. From where I sit, its usefulness is rapidly fading, if not bordering on irrelevance.

While it remains to be seen whether retail traffic declines will last forever, most traditional retailers will struggle to grow physical store sales in the face of the significant and inexorable shift to online shopping. With few exceptions, so-called “omnichannel” retailers are experiencing flat to slightly down brick-and-mortar revenues while their e-commerce business continues to grow 10-20%. The mostly moribund department store sector points to this new reality. While overall revenues are basically going nowhere, online sales now account for over 30% of total revenue at Neiman Marcus, over 20% at Nordstrom and Saks, and some 18% at Macy’s (according to eMarketer), with the percentage growing every quarter.

What we do know, and what’s important to grasp and appreciate, is that physical stores are critical drivers of e-commerce success–and vice versa. For most retailers, a brick-and-mortar location sits at the heart of a brand’s ecosystem for a given trade area. Any retailer with a decent level of channel integration employs stores to acquire new customers, to serve, buy online, pickup in store orders (and returns) and to convert shoppers that start their shopping online but need to touch, feel or try on a product before buying. The decision of “digitally native” brands like Amazon, Bonobos, Warby Parker and others to open stores underscores this fact. Conversely, legacy retailers must be careful to avoid closing too many stores or they risk damaging the overall brand, slowing e-commerce growth and accelerating a downward spiral.

Customers shop brands, not channels or touchpoints. A robust one brand, many channels strategy requires management teams to understand precisely how the various marketing, experience and transactional channels interact to make a more relevant and remarkable whole. With this understanding, same-store sales performance may still have some utility, but “same trade area” performance–which accounts for all sales regardless of purchase channel within the influence area of a store–becomes a far more interesting and useful metric. Critically, it also provides the basis for understanding the drivers of customer segment level performance at a more granular and actionable level.

Rapidly declining same-store sales performance may suggest the need for aggressive action, including shuttering stores. Unquestionably, the great de-leveraging of retail store economics is cause for real concern. But without a broader view of how digital commerce and the in-store shopping experience work together, an obsession with same-store sales performance will inevitably lead to some very dumb decisions indeed.

 A version of this story recently appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts here.  
Winning on Experience

Every Single Retail Store in the US To Close Permanently By Month’s End

stevenpdennis3 Comments

In a surprise move that underscores the sweeping changes faced by the retail industry, the National Retail Federation, speaking on behalf of all of its members, announced today that every brick & mortar location of every retailer in the United States would close forever within the next few weeks. For nearly a decade “traditional” retailers have been struggling with profitability as sales shifted online and more consumers started to notice that many retailers appeared to have given up years earlier. Yet the move to close down every single store in America still came as a shock to most industry observers.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a CEO of one major retail brand remarked “I would have thought that the fact that 90% of all shopping is still done in physical locations would have been enough to warrant keeping at least a few stores around. I guess I was wrong.” Former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who was recently named Sears’ 13th CEO in as many months, seemed surprised as well. “Wait, most shopping is still done in stores? I guess maybe we should have worked on making our stores better rather than thinking that closing them down would somehow make things better? Oops.”

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, the brand that has benefitted the most from consumers’ growing love of e-commerce, was approached for comment after delivering his keynote at the annual World Hyperbole Conference in Geneva, but would not speak to reporters. He was, however seen high-fiving Elon Musk off stage and doing what some described as a “clumsy Irish jig” upon learning the news.

Other industry veterans were more circumspect. Ryan Gozzi, a prominent Wall Street analyst who has been pushing many retail brands to shutter locations to improve profitability, commented “honestly I think this just goes too far. I always envisioned retailers would cut and cut until they had just a handful of stores that did like $15,000 per square foot, you know like Warby Parker, Bonobos and Birchbox.” When asked what he thought of today’s announcement Ron Johnson, who oversaw a failed attempt to re-invent JC Penney, looked earnestly into the interviewer’s eyes and exclaimed “Apple. Apple. Target. Apple. Target. Apple. Apple,” then added “golly that’s big news. I was only able to decrease Penney’s sales by about 40%. So signing up for destroying 100% of sales is truly transformative. Gosh I’m impressed.”

The complete shut down of all stores comes after many retailers had aggressively explored new strategies to revive their fortunes. According to multiple sources, newly appointed Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette recently presented his Board with a bold plan to turn the storied retailer around. The strategy, developed with a team of 2nd year Wharton MBA students, was designed to transform the Macy’s culture and incorporate many of the components that have allowed so-called “digitally native” brands to grab market share away from traditional player while transferring billions of dollars from venture capitalists to consumers without anyone apparently noticing or caring.

The new plan reportedly called for the company to relocate its headquarters to a loft-building in the Pearl District of Portland where employees would receive complimentary Stumptown Coffee and Voodoo Donuts, in addition to an enhanced benefits package. Reports that corporate staff would be required to bring their dogs to work could not be independently confirmed. According to multiple sources, sales associates were to be re-named “customer service sensei’s” and the company would guarantee 15 minute delivery of any product anywhere in the continental United States for free. Initial plans also called for consumers to receive 1,500 Plenti points with every order over $50 but were dropped when research revealed that no one knew what Plenti points were.

According to insiders the plan hinged on four key elements:

  • Liberal use of the words “disruptive” and “transformative” in conversation, written communication and speeches at analyst meetings and conferences.
  • Getting on the cover of Fast Company.
  • A willingness to lose a cumulative $27 billion over the next 10 years.
  • A miracle happening in year 11.

The Board was reportedly initially intrigued, but the strategy lost support when one member pointed out that the plan was mostly just a description of Amazon’s strategy and that nothing was being done to improve the products Macy’s sold or the actual shopping experience. Ultimately a growing malaise crept over the Board despite plans to hold their Board dinner that evening at Masa. According to one long time Macy’s Director “while we were excited to dine together that night at arguably the best sushi restaurant outside of Japan, we couldn’t get past the realization that when it came to our business we had nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

While today’s announcement would seem to doom many once leading brands to the retail graveyard, some believe Walmart might come out ahead. The Bentonville, Arkansas based company recently began aggressively acquiring online-only brands in a bid to become “more customer relevant and digitally savvy.” Sean Spicer, Walmart’s newly appointed VP of Cash Incineration Initiatives, told the Wall Street Journal that the shuttering of all physical stores only validated what Walmart has been saying all along and that anyone who says otherwise is either stupid or lying. Challenged on that remark Spicer added: “Hold on, hold on, hold on. We’ve always maintained that the future of retail is selling cheap stuff that Americans need, shipping it to their house, losing money on every order and making it up on volume. If you can’t see that you haven’t been paying attention.” He then told reporters to direct any further questions to the Justice Department.

The economic impact of closings tens of thousands of stores and putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work remains unclear, but many were concerned it could lead to a recession. It also cast serious doubt on President Trump’s claim that ‘we would be winning so much we would get tired of winning.” Prior to today’s news a recent Gallup survey confirmed that most Americans weren’t remotely tired of winning.

Many commercial real estate investors also expressed concern that billions of square feet of vacant retail space coming on the market all at once would have a depressive effect on rents. Despite this widely shared belief, General Michael Flynn, recently named President of the Association for Commercial Real Estate Over-Capacity Denial” noted that the industry had gone through multiple down cycles over the years and that any excess supply would quickly be absorbed. “For every Home Depot or Target that closes there are plenty of Soul Cycles and expensive juice bars with that one employee awkwardly standing there to take their place” Flynn said.

 

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Being Remarkable · Customer experience · Digital · e-commerce · Frictionless commerce · Omni-channel

Omni-channel is dead. Long live omni-channel 

stevenpdennisLeave a comment

“Omni-channel” has been one of retail’s favorite buzzwords for years now. At last week’s excellent ShopTalk conference, several speakers challenged the relevance of omni-channel. This conversation is long overdue.

The shift from a “multichannel” strategy–being active in multiple channels such as physical stores, catalogs and e-commerce–to omni-channel, suggested some form of profound change. It created a veritable cottage industry in related buzzphrases like “seamless integration,” “frictionless commerce” and “being channel agnostic.” To be honest, I’ve been known to throw some of these terms around in blog posts and keynote talks with reckless abandon.

Yet five years or so into this journey, it’s increasingly obvious that omni-channel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Many of the retailers at the forefront of omni-channel evangelism–Macy’s being the most glaring example–have only delivered quarter after quarter of disappointing performance. Many struggling retailers have problems that go far beyond merely drinking the omni-channel Kool-Aid. But the fascination with, and massive investment in, all things omni, have in many cases made matters far worse. A recalibration is needed. Perhaps the term needs to be buried.

The first problem is that retailers have been chasing ubiquity when they need to be chasing relevance and differentiation. Clearly, customers are engaging in more channels as part of their shopping journeys and retailers must respond accordingly. But in trying to be everywhere many brands have ended up being nowhere when it comes to a compelling offering. Undifferentiated product, less than remarkable customer service and uncompetitive pricing aren’t helped by extending their reach.

The second problem stems from investing in e-commerce and digital marketing with insufficient focus and prioritization. The majority of retail purchases in virtually all categories start online and, despite conventional wisdom, digitally influenced physical store sales are far bigger than online sales. Many traditional retailers made their e-commerce offering better while underinvesting in their physical stores, seeming to forget that the lion’s share of shopping is still done in brick & mortar locations. Not every aspect of e-commerce or embracing a “digital-first” strategy is important.

The third problem is that a lot of e-commerce remains unprofitable and many digitally-based customer acquisition strategies are uneconomic. The future of omni-channel will not be evenly distributed. Retailers need to have a well-sequenced roadmap of digital marketing and channel integration initiatives rooted in a deep understanding of customer behavior and underlying economics. Too much of what has been done thus far has been more shotgun, rather than laser-sighted rifle, in its approach, and the generally poor results illustrate this quite dramatically.

The fourth problem is somehow thinking that customers care about channels. Customers care about experiences, about solutions, about shopping with ease and simplicity. At the risk of advocating yet another buzzphrase, “unified commerce” is far more descriptive of what needs to happen than “omni-channel.” “All channels” never suggested a meaningful consumer benefit. And it never will.

Of course, engaging in semantic arguments doesn’t ultimately accomplish very much. But neither does continuing to plow mindlessly ahead, chasing a once bright and shiny object that is rapidly losing its luster.

A version of this story appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts here.

Digital · Retail · Winning on Experience

What if retail traffic declines last forever?

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The results keep pouring in and they don’t bode well for brick & mortar retail. Across just about every sector and virtually every time period, traffic to physical stores continues to decline.

Of course, for the most part, we aren’t buying less, we are shopping differently. The obvious dominant trend is the explosion of e-commerce, and the one player accounting for the most growth is Amazon. Yet the real news for everyone else is how shoppers are diversifying the channels in which they research purchases and ultimately transact. This so-called “omni-channel” world is wreaking havoc with traditional retailers’ underlying economics and, like most things, the future will not be evenly distributed.

The vast majority of retailers have now likely entered a period where comparable store traffic will never increase again for any sustained period of time.

That’s profound. And more than a bit scary.

Drops in store traffic almost always dictate sales declines. Given that physical stores have relatively high fixed costs (rent, inventory, staffing, etc.) a material drop in revenue deleverages operating costs and profits fall disproportionately. This long-term (and increasingly widespread) trend is causing a great deleveraging across many retail segments and is the primary reason so many stores are being closed. It’s also causing brands to rethink the size and operating nature of the stores that remain or they plan to open. These shifts will prove seismic.

While there is a belief that e-commerce’s economics are superior to brick & mortar stores, that frequently is not the case, primarily owing to challenging supply chain costs, high product returns and compressed margins. As traditional retailers invest heavily in building their digital operations–and creating the much vaunted seamlessly integrated shopping experience–many are merely spending a lot of money to move sales from one channel to the other, often at lower profitability. Even brands such as Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and, to a lesser degree, Macy’s, that are often touted as omni-channel pioneers and have industry leading online penetration, have seen profit growth stall despite massive investments.

Roughly 90% of all retail is still done in physical stores. Yet the growth of e-commerce will continue unabated and the resulting drop in store traffic is an undeniable and unrelenting force. With rare exception, there is little any retailer can do to stem this tide. One key focus must therefore be on right-sizing store counts and the remaining stores’ footprints and operating costs. But the far more important strategy is to create a remarkable customer experience across all channels that reflects how consumers shop today and the intersectionality of digital and physical channels. Ultimately the key is to maximize customer growth, loyalty and profitability irrespective of where the customer decides to transact.

The pain of store traffic declines is inevitable.

The degree of suffering from it remains optional.

 

This post originally appeared on Forbes where I recently became a contributor. You can check out more of my writing by going here.

Being Remarkable · Customer-centric · Digital · Frictionless commerce · Omni-channel · Winning on Experience

Stop blaming Amazon for department store woes

stevenpdennis12 Comments

Given Amazon’s staggering growth and willingness to lose money to grab market share it’s easy to blame them for everything that is ailing “traditional” retail overall–and the  department store sector in particular.

In fact, with announcements last week from Macy’s to Kohl’s and Sears to JC Penney that could only charitably be called “disappointing” many folks that get paid to understand this stuff reflexively jumped on the “it’s all Amazon’s fault” bandwagon. Too bad they are mostly wrong.

The fact is the department store sector has been losing consumer relevance and share for a long, long time–and certainly well before Amazon had even a detectable amount of competing product in core department store categories.

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The fact is it’s just as logical to blame off-price and warehouse club retailer growth–which is almost entirely done in physical locations, by the way–for department stores’ problems.

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The fact is that, despite other challenges along the way, Nordstrom, Saks and Neiman Marcus have maintained share by transitioning a huge amount of their brick & mortar business to their online channels and have closed only a handful of stores in the last few years. Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus now both derive some 25% of their total sales from e-commerce.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Amazon isn’t stealing business from the major department store players. Clearly they are. And as Amazon continues to grow its apparel business they will grab more and more share.

But the underlying reason for department stores decades long struggle is the sector’s consistent inability to transform their customer experience, product assortments, marketing strategies and real estate to meet consumers’ evolving needs.

More recently, those brands that have been slow to embrace digital first retail are scrambling to play catch up. Those that still haven’t broken down the silos that create barriers to a frictionless shopping experience will continue to hemorrhage customers and cash.

Most importantly those that think they can out Amazon Amazon are engaged in a race to the bottom. And as Seth reminds us, the problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win.

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