Clearly the answer isn’t quite so black and white and as you'd expect, the debate took the well-trodden path of how e-commerce can aid the high street through multichannel communications and used recent Christmas sales growth as an example of reinvigorating the retail sector. This was countered with cold hard facts of shop closures, redundancies and empty units up and down the country, 1 in 7 according to Mr Stringer, not to mention the fact that Amazon haven’t rushed into 'bricks and mortar' in order to offer a multichannel service.
Aside from the usual rhetoric, a few interesting points did come out of this session.
- Understanding the customer - e-commerce has given more power to the shopper and with more choice and information comes a more efficient, more competitive, polished service, except that’s the problem – with the high street, it doesn’t. The High street hasn’t evolved, it hasn’t played to its strengths and now, in an open market, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that a stronger competitor has come along with a better service. Being online doesn’t equal success, just look at MySpace. Amazon doesn't just have lower overheads, it's an extremely well run business that understands what it's customer wants and has built a customer experience and product offering accordingly, and that's what is giving it the edge. Ten years ago we were having this same conversation, except it was Tesco that was 'killing local businesses'. This current battle will come down to consumer choice, if the High Street continues to fail in adding value to it's offering and instead enter a pricing war it will only serve to encourage consumers to opt for the short term price benefit and that's a battle that bricks and mortar stores will never be able to win.
- What do we mean by the High Street? Big cities, smaller cities, market towns and villages all have them, but they tend to look very different and serve very different purposes. In a new digital age with no post offices and fewer and fewer local pubs, maybe we need to consider what the broader role of the High Street ought to be. You could argue that the web, and to a certain extent e-commerce has actually levelled the playing field for those much smaller businesses. A local craftsman doesn’t just have to rely on a classified ad in the local paper and passing trade, he can cost effectively target the whole country without needing to master coding and complex e-commerce systems in the process.
- The mobile opportunity - I was surprised at how little discussion there was about mobile in all of this. Even Facebook (in its recent S-1 report) has flagged the fact that it needs to better adapt to the on-going trend to access the web through hand held devices. For me, it represents a real opportunity for retail. Yes, people can compare there and then in store but it also allows retailers to target passing trade, provide a real personalised experience in store and improve the face to face customer service through leveraging a broader support network (such as Twelpforce at Best Buy).
In reality, it’s only the High Street that can save itself and to do that, businesses need to evolve with the consumer and play to their strengths. Look to the successes and consider what drivers are at play for each of those retailers. When you consider that brits see shopping as a national pastime, its clear that an almost primeval desire is already in place with the audience, what stores have to do is reignite that passion and meet the demands of a new type of information laden, savvy shopper. Of course people want a competitive price and convenience, but they also want to talk to someone, to hold something, touch it, feel it, a physical and sensory experience that can be shared, that's great fun and that gets them wanting more - all the High Street has to do is supply it.
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