Conference

27-28 april 2016

Birmingham (UK)

The Connected Store of Future

The Connected store of the future is designed to illuminate the most ground-breaking technologies and strategies that are driving the digital store, so retailers can get smarter about the way to help shoppers feel connected in multiple retail spaces and online places! Hear from leading retailers who are successfully delivering a seamless online to physical store shopping experience, boosting sales and enhancing customer experience

International & Cross Border

International & Cross Border will showcase strategies for overcoming significant challenges of planning, establishing and growing retail operations in multiple countries. Hear how UK retailers are evaluating the risk of entering new territories and taking advantage of growth opportunities in both established and emerging international markets.

Insight & Experience

The digital revolution has precipitated a massive shift in retail. Customers now have the freedom to shop from the comfort of their home with a phone, laptop, tablet and other devices. Insight and Experience will explore the best practice to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds for a seamless and memorable customer experience.

Multichannel Fulfilment

Does your delivery service meet your customers’ expectations? Delivery is one of the most important parts of the multichannel process and a challenge for retailers to get it right and keep customers happy. The anytime anywhere customer knows what she wants and expects a range of delivery options to choose from. Find out how retailers can manage the operational challenges to ensure speedy delivery and collection in the Multichannel Fulfilment conference.

Mobile in Multichannel

Mobile pervades everything and is continuously on the rise. We are now at a stage where ecommerce is ‘mobile-first’. The focus is moving from the “newness” of the mobile device to understand the impact on staff, stores and services when the customer is holding a “remote control for retail” in her hand. Where are the newest and biggest opportunities for retailers and how can they deploy the latest technologies to win the virtual race?

Digital Sales & Marketing

Digital Marketing is increasingly complex but retailers keen to gain the competitive edge are realising that getting to grips with digital can offer more opportunity to reach customers and deliver results. How can you use digital to shape a customer-centric culture, deliver more compelling customer experiences and use data, journey mapping and personalisation to create campaigns and drive behavioural change? Find out at the Digital Sales and Marketing Conference.

Digital Merchandising

How easy is it for your customers to log on, find what they want, purchase it, receive it on time and in perfect condition? Digital Merchandising is designed for retailers who want to connect with the customer online to win new business, with a focus on converting customers and boosting online sales. Find out about the latest tools and strategies to create new websites and display products in a way that is accessible and attractive to online shoppers.

Operations in Multichannel

Since the emergence of online shopping, retailers have restructured operations, models and relationships with customers and suppliers in order to achieve supply chain effectiveness. This conference will look at how leading retailers are getting to grips with new technology and operational strategies designed to increase growth opportunities and customer satisfaction.

Download the presentations

THEME 2016

Connected Retail: The New World Order

By end of 2016, connected retail is expected to influence 44% of retail sales.*

Built on the pillars of innovation, convenience and engagement, Connected Retail seeks to offer fully-integrated, digitally enhanced, personalised in-store experiences that engage customers at the intersection of the virtual and digital world.

This is done by integrating channels and optimising all business processes including sourcing, HR, supply chain, operations, payments and marketing.

Connected Retail offers retailers the opportunity to digitally enhance immediacy, control, convenience, touch-and-feel and face-to-face interactions — key factors that form a store’s core strengths.

However, connected retail demands a fundamental and enterprise-wide transformation in the current operating model. New systems will have to be put in place, new priorities set and new job roles defined – all centred on the customer.

Connected Retail is undoubtedly The New World Order and therefore the focus of Retail Leadership Summit 2016.

*Forrester

RLS 2015

RLS 2014

RLS 2013

Author: Chris Anderson

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Comments: The director of the extraordinarily successful TED Talks conferences since 2000, Chris Anderson, has worked behind the scenes to create a really effective way of communicating ideas of all sorts with a truly eclectic range of speakers. As one commentator has put it: "The TED Talk has reinvented the art of rhetoric for the 21st century. Goodbye to windy academese, scientific gobbledygook, pompous moralizing, powerpoint chloroform – we now know that "ideas worth spreading" can indeed be spread far and wide, and with clarity and panache." All of us can benefit from some improvement in our communication.

Attracting and engaging tomorrow's consumers How can retailers create winning customer experiences in a digital age?

Organisational change and leadership

The consumer is constantly transforming and you must keep up. How can you build innovation from within? How can you build a more agile organisation that can keep pace with the change ?

Customer experience

From technology to the people who sell your products, making your customer (your guest) feel special has never been more important. What strategies fly or fail? Who is winning and why?

Disruption and innovation

Who is doing what differently and why does it work? From young entrepreneurs making waves in retail and related industries, to established brands revising their business and customer engagement models – the Congress is dedicated to shaking up your thinking.

Engaging with your consumer

How do you talk to your customer across marketing, advertising and social media? How should you be?

International expansion

Conquering the world is no easy feat, but it can be easier. What can be learned from the battles won and lost by retailers around the globe who continue to expand?

New markets (and old)

Iran and parts of Asia and Africa hold exciting retail potential, while the way the BRICs need to be approached is changing. Get to grips with the entry challenges and opportunities in these markets.

Future-gazing: What’s next?

From the way consumers will shop, to mobile use and shifting demographics – what is on the horizon for retail?

Author: Martin Lindstrom

Author: Adam Gazzaley & Larry Rosen

Author: Arun Sundararajan

Author: David Sax

Author: Lynda Gratton & Andrew Scott

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Comments: Lynda Gratton, together with her colleague from the London Business School, continues her exploration of the future of work with this essay on the challenges and intelligent choices that all of us, of any age, need to make in order to turn greater life expectancy into a gift and not a curse. We need to move away from the three-stage approach to our working lives: education, followed by work, and then retirement since life expectancy is rising, final-salary pensions are vanishing and an increasing number of people are juggling multiple careers.

Author: Robert Gordon

Author: David Crystal

Author: Adam Grant

Publisher: Viking

Comments: Adam Grant from Wharton School, addresses the challenge of improving the world, from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all? He tells surprising stories from different areas of life which explore how to recognise a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act and manage fear and doubt. He looks at how parents and teachers can nurture originality in children, and how leaders can build cultures that welcome dissent. Specific examples inlude Apple, the CIA, Finance and TV.

Author: Alan Lewis and Dan McKone

Author: Sydney Finkelstein

Author: Emma McClendon

Author: Joshua Cooper Ramo

Author: Alan Treadgold and Jonathan Reynolds

Author: Joshua Gans

Author: Vijay Govindarajan

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Comments:Probably one of the classics in management theory about innovation, The Three Box Solution develops Harvard Professor Govindarajan’s idea that, in order to innovate, companies need to create a separate innovation team; nevertheless linked to the core business; and evaluated not in terms of financial metrics but in terms of its ability to test assumptions about the future. Box 1 is about managing the present. It is about competing for the present through incremental measures and is about closing the performance gap. Boxes 2 and 3 are about selectively forgetting the past and creating the future. They are therefore about competing for the future by responding to weak and non-linear signals to develop new business models and new customers. This is about closing the possibility gap. Each of the two areas must benefit from separate resources which need to be ring-fenced so that, when times get tough, the creation of the future is not jeopardised.

watch him

See also The Day after Tomorrow: how to survive in times of radical innovation by Peter Hinssen

and Dealing with Darwin: how great companies innovate at every stage of their evolution by Geoffrey A. Moore

Author: Klaus Schwab

Author: Afdhel Aziz & Bobby Jones

Publisher: Regan Arts

Comments:We have been talking for a long time about the new marketing model. This book is a contribution to that debate. Millennials and Gen Z no longer trust advertising. While they still insist on cutting-edge products, they demand increased social responsibility from their brands. Brands have always had to be cool. Now they also need to be good. The authors, both from marketing, use a provocative and street-wise style to critique conventional marketing to advocate creating a new model in which great marketing optimises life. They use insights and interviews with Zappos, Citibank, The Honest Company, as well as Lady Gaga, Pharell and Justin Bieber. The latest manifestation of conscious capitalism.

Author: Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind

Author: Catherine J. Turco

Author: Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson