Authors: Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Comments:The authors, from the Rotman  School of Management of the University of Toronto, recast AI as a significant lowering of the cost of prediction. When seen in this way, the magic of AI as it is used to drive cars, to trade stocks or to teach children, falls away and the hype becomes, in economic terms, cheap prediction. As such it still has extraordinary potential. For example, prediction is at the heart of decision-making under uncertainty; prediction tools increase productivity through handling machines, handling documents and communicating with customers; prediction liberates strategy and opens the door to new business structures and strategies. A good introduction to AI, Prediction Machines develops its huge consequences out of a relatively simple economics framework.

Author: Giulia Mensitieri

Publisher: La Découverte

Comments: This book, based on a doctorate in anthropology at EHESS, France, is packed with revelations about the fashion world. For example that a number of models strutting the runways of top fashion houses are doing so for free; that the clothes presented are assembled often for several months, day and night, by talented workers on minimum wages. This story of stylists, models, photographers, creators and make-up artists is a story of passion and devotion which enables all these actors to accept the unacceptable, and to trade their flexibility for a form of slavery. It uncovers a new form of insecurity characteristic of modern capitalistic cultural industries, which combine with glamour, fame and visibility. The book is an attempt to decode the invisible dynamics underpinning the fashion industry and thus “deglamourize” it.

IADS Takeaways

Presentations - Day 2

Key growth trends for Asia retailing - Michelle Grant

Building a New Interactive Retail Platform (Ⅱ) - Roger Wang

Back to the Nature of Retail, Innovative Retail Transformation Model - Fang Wei

More growth! Challenge to the future of the Japanese retail and distribution industry - Yotetsu Hayashi

Retail Business Environment in South East Asia - Shaun Chong

The making of SOGO Malaysia - our journey into the future - Datuk Alfred Cheng

Seven Eleven’s Management Strategy - Kazuki Furuya

Introduction - Shah Karim

The future is scary - Howard Saunders

Presentations - Day 3

The Art Creativeity & Design in Retailing - John Peeters

Omni-channel is the new Retail Reality - Hoseok Kim

Be Open and Innovate，to Share and Empower - Qian Fangzheng

The Art of Being World Class in F&B - Joanne Denney-Finch

EAT. DRINK. SHOP. - Benjamin Yong

The present condition of Japanese Retail Business (supermarket) and challenges in the future - Yukio Kawano

New Retail Trends - Chen Xiao Dong

Online Payment disruption and creating blue ocean - Chan Kok Long

Adherence and Innovation: Payment under New Retails - Hu Ying

AEON’s basic philosophy and the role of retailer - Soichi Okazaki

APRCE 2017 - website

General Information

Takeaways

Programme

Presentations

Global Economic Outlook - Craig Wright, Royal Bank of Canada

Omnichannel Retailing: the Inconvenient Truth - Nicolo Galante, Central Group

Serving Customers in a Digitally Connected World - Erik Nordstrom, Nordstrom

Store Pictures

Holt Renfrew, Toronto

Nordstrom, Toronto

Hudson's Bay, Toronto

The World Retail Congress took place in April 2017 in Dubai. A report on the congress has now been produced. It give some details of presentations, some videos, and a summary. The ten main points to takeaway:

1. The transformation of retail is taking place now.

1. Retailers are not selling stuff but selling experiences.

1. Data is everything.

1. By 2020, most retailers will have a digital stage.

1. The next technology age is that of machine learning.

1. Change is taking place at an unprecedented speed.

1. Do not forget the basics of retail: emotion, people, service and product.

1. Consumers now expect sustainability from retailers.

1. Think Gen Z and Gen α (those born entirely in 21st century).

1. The future will see a total integration of online, offline, logistics, and data.

see WRC report

Next meeting: 17-19 April 2018, Madrid, Spain

THEME 2017

Mobile marketing on all channels

euroshop17 - pix

Reaching the mobile customer anywhere

Similar to the “classic” forms of advertising, mobile marketing also offers a variety of options to reach the user.

This includes the retailer’s own apps of course, advertising in external sponsored apps and on mobile websites as well as the increasingly utilized QR code, which routes the user to the store or directly to the product.

Next Event

IADS Takeaways

Presentations

A View From Walmart: How Retailers are Creating Economic Opportunity

How to Turn New Customers Into Repeat Consumers

Your Secret Weapon: Making Retail With Personality

#Lovethestore: When You Do Digital Right

"Glocalization:" Why Going Global Means Not Forgetting Local Identities

Move Over, Globalization: Community Retail Has Arrived

more presentations

Author: Doug Stephens

Publisher: Figure 1 Publishing

Comments: This book continues where the author’s previous book, The Retail Revival, left off. Well-known futurist Doug Stephens gives a picture of the future where every aspect of retail experience will be transformed. The very concept of what stores are, how consumers shop, and even the core economic model for revenue will be profoundly reinvented. In the words of the author, “even the centuries-old formula through which retail companies make money – the core economic model – is going to be shape-shifted beyond recognition and with it, the very concept of what a store is and what it does is going to be rewritten.” Nevertheless, our need as humans for social contact in the physical shopping activity remains, but stores cannot continue as mere distribution centres in a world where customer expectations have been radically altered by technology.

Author: Adam Alter

Publisher: Penguin Press

Comments:According to Adam Alter, professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, we live in an age of behavioural addiction. Whether it is emails, Instagram likes, TV episodes, or working hours, we are allowing our behaviour to be set for us. We spend an average three hours a day on our smartphones and millennial kids struggle to interact with real, live humans. He tracks how so many of today’s products are “irresistible”. He also suggests how we can harness addictive products for the good; to improve how we communicate, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play.

Author: Yuval Noah Harari

Publisher: Harper

Comments:After his stunning bestseller and international phenomenon, Sapiens, which chronicled the rise of homo sapiens from primate to dominant force on the planet, Professor Harari from the University of Jerusalem does it again with a “history of tomorrow”. He claimed that after the agricultural and scientific revolutions, humankind was creating networked intelligences with a far greater capacity for reason than our own. This last book examines that scenario in more detail. Modernity is a deal, he writes: the new human powers come with a cost. What he calls “dataism”, a universal faith in the power of algorithms, will become sacrosanct. In exchange for immortality, happiness and power, humans will trade the meaning of their lives and become “biochemical subsystems”. There will be created an enormous “useless class” of redundant people without economic or military purpose. According to one review, the book leaves us with the question: “What is more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?”

Authors: Scott D. Anthony, Clark G. Gilbert, Mark W. Johnson

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Comments: In these days when “transformation” is seen as the only way to stay alive, the challenge of simultaneously building a new business while maintaining the existing disrupted business, is one faced by many. One task in this transformation is doing what you are doing better, faster or cheaper. Many are going digital to deal with this. Another is “core transformation”, that is, doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way. A third is strategic involving changing the very essence of the company. Examples include Amazon shifting from retail to cloud computing or Walgreens from pharmacy retailing to treating chronic illnesses. When executed well, this can reinvigorate a company’s growth. Executed badly, on the other hand, leads doubters to say that the company should have stuck to its original business.

Author: Scott Galloway

Publisher: Portfolio

Comments: Scott Galloway, professor at NYU’s Stern School and founder of L2, is a well-known speaker and commentator on retail. He holds controversial views on a number of topics and has been following the four companies sometimes referred to as GAFA for some time. His take on their dominance is interesting and backed up with figures, information and some striking comments. For example, there are only six countries remaining in the world with a GDP larger than the combined market cap of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. They already exert untold influence over the economy, public policy and consumer behaviour. He believes that each company is attempting to take over in areas where the others have been dominant. His verdict is that Amazon will eventually win.

Author: Stephen King

Publisher: Yale University Press

Comments: Globalisation is not new: in the late 19th century, capital moved freely around the world, goods were traded across national boundaries and people migrated on a proportionally far greater scale than they do today. All that ended with the first world war. Trade and economies recovered and globalisation began again spurred more recently by the internet and the spread of liberal capitalism. According to Stephen King, an economist at HSBC, one of the most global banks, this may be due to change again. Technological development has led to robots which may replace at home cheap labour in the developing world with subsequent impact on global supply chains; the internet has also created inequality with increasing divisions between “haves” and “have nots”; furthermore, a resurgence of migration has caused a political backlash on both economic and cultural grounds with a rise of populism; geopolitical shifts may also have an effect. One consequence is that cooperative arrangements between nation states will be less frequent and more challenging. “Conflict, he says, at least in the economic sphere, will become ever more frequent”.

Sensemaking: the power of the humanities in the age of the algorithm

Author: Christian Madsbjerg

Publisher: Hachette

The Fuzzy and the Techie: why the liberal arts will rule the digital world

Author: Scott Hartley

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

According to the authors, it is time to stop worshipping algorithms and rediscover the value of arts and humanities in business. For Christian Madsbjerg, a strategic innovation consultant, there is a liberal arts deficit which is in danger of preventing businesses from engaging with the culture, language and history of their customers. If businesses accept pure data as their only truth, they are in danger of losing their ability to understand people. The best chief executives can read a novel ad a spreadsheet.

For Scott Hartley, a venture capitalist and start-up advisor, the “techies” are more in danger of being replaced by automated processes, while the “fuzzies” who studied liberal arts with their creative skills and broad understanding of communication techniques and ideas may well populate Silicon Valley C-suites in greater numbers in the future. In fact, it is already happening, with many start-ups in the tech industry being established by fuzzies.

Author: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Publisher: Dey Street Books

Comments:The author, a former data scientist at Google, argues that the web will revolutionise social science just as the microscope and telescope transformed the natural sciences. Microeconomics, sociology, political science and quantitative psychology all depend to a large extent on surveys of a few thousand respondents. In contrast, Big Data has four unique powers: it provides new sources of information; it captures what people actually do or think rather than what they choose to tell researchers; it allows researchers to home in on and compare demographic or geographical subsets; and it allows for speedy randomised controlled trials that demonstrate not just correlation but causality. He illustrates his points with surprising and sometimes disturbing material (such as the prevalence of searches on pornographic sites for videos depicting violence against women, and the fact that women themselves seek out these scenes at least twice as often as men do). He also warns against abuse of such knowledge: for example if liking motorcycles turns out to predict a lower IQ, should employers be allowed to reject applicants who admit to liking motorcycles? On the whole, however, he is optimistic and claims that humans will be able to learn a lot more about themselves in a lot less time.

Author: Porter Erisman

Publisher: St Martin’s Press

Comments:The author, ex-vice president at Alibaba group, is known as an expert on e-commerce in emerging markets. In some of these, such as China, India and Nigeria, e-commerce in entering a golden age. This is where, he claims, the next stage of e-commerce development will take place. It is being driven by widespread internet adoption, a rising middle class, and most importantly by innovative new business models which serve the needs of local customers better than the models used by western giants. The mistake of western companies, including Amazon, is to apply the original model to emerging markets. As Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba put it, it is like putting a Rolls Royce jet airplane engine into a hang glider. Alibaba started by focusing on the asset-light C2C model with Taobao before shifting focus to B2C with Tmall. In addition, the western Amazon model leaves little room for product information and a rich experience, which doesn’t matter if customers are already familiar with the product from other channels. On Tmall in China, on the other hand, all kinds of videos, product demos, colourful branded content and more is possible on the site which fits emerging markets better.

Author: Rick Nason

Publisher: Rotman-UTP Publishing

Comments:The author, from Dalhousie University in Canada, offers a paradigm shift for business away from the traditional modes of compartmentalising problems and solutions. Principles of “complexity thinking” empower managers to understand, correlate, and explain a diverse range of business phenomena. Complex and complicated are not interchangeable terms.  Understanding the differences between simple, complicated, and complex processes and systems, enable professionals to identify, understand, deal with, and exploit complexity in the business and investment realm. The difference, widely accepted by the scientific community, is still unfamiliar in business, but might be usefully applied to a number of different businesses or situations. While complicatedness can usually be solved, for example by breaking down the problem into elements, it is predictable though often wasteful. Complexity, on the other hand, is non-linear, random, and interconnected. It requires another approach.

Author: Amir Husain

Publisher: Scribner

Comments:Amir Husain is an entrepreneur and serves on IBM’s Advisory Board for Watson and Cognitive Computing. His company SparkCognition helps businesses and governments respond to threats. Husain rejects the facile views of AI which characterise it either as the solution to all problems, or as leading us down the dark dystopian path to human irrelevance. He considers the risks and potential of AI and how we should approach them and draws the conclusion that we can ultimately benefit from AI.

Author: Jennifer Mueller

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Comments: According to Jennifer Mueller, we all crave creativity but we also often reject it. Why is that? Partly at least because the uncertainty of new ideas makes us think, and this makes us uncomfortable. However, it has never been as risky as it is today to play safe, and at the same time it has never been tougher to embrace newness. We need to foster creativity in ourselves and to reduce our resistance to it when it occurs around us. Based on the latest psychological studies, the book is aimed at leaders in any area including business, education, science, who tend to choose the familiar even as they profess commitment to innovation.

Author: Andrew McAfee & Erik Brynjolfsson

Publisher: W. W. Norton

Comments:The authors, both from MIT, who also gave us The Second Machine Age, offer a trip through important digital trends such as machine intelligence, big data, and the sharing economy.  The disruptive development of machine learning, AI, and robotics will sometimes displace humans, while the winning firms of the near-term future will leverage these shifts to “bring together minds and machines, products and platforms, and the core and the crowd very differently than most do today.” Among the facets of this different world are algorithmically driven “automatic decisions,” by which Amazon cross-recommends products to shoppers and airfare prices respond to the laws of supply and demand; in time, machines will be coming up with proposals and projects “that people can extend and improve.”

Author: Cass S. Sunstein

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Comments:As we become ever more sorted into groups of like-minded people by increasingly sophisticated social media companies, we live in “echo chambers” that merely amplify our own views. We no longer communicate with people of different political horizons, in fact we often cannot understand them anymore. According to Cass Sunstein, professor at Harvard Law School, and best-selling author, we need to rethink the critical relationship between democracy and the internet. “Cybercascades” and “confirmation bias” are two elements of the current online world which assist “polarization entrepreneurs” to exploit online fragmentation which endangers the shared conversations, experiences, and understandings that are the lifeblood of democracy. It might be argued, following his line of thought, that the holy grail of personalisation in retailing will eliminate serendipity in shopping and indeed put an end to shopping itself.

Author: Kate Raworth.

Publisher: Cornerstone Press.

Comments: Oxford economist Kate Raworth argues that output and growth were the defining concerns of economics since the end of the 1950s with a fixation on GDP. These are no longer appropriate to the present. Nobel economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz and 23 other leading economists concluded that “those attempting to guide the economy and our society are like pilots trying to steer a course without a reliable compass”.

The Doughnut is an attempt to provide such a compass. The inner ring sets out 12 social foundations for humanity identified as sustainable development goals; the outer ring is formed of 9 planetary boundaries that earth system scientists have identified as being necessary for planetary stability. It replaces an impossible goal of endless growth by one of thriving in balance.

The theory has often been mentioned in the context of sustainability debates.

Author: David Bosshart

Publisher: GDI

Comments: According to Bosshart, the director of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institut in Switzerland, our increasingly complex global community is characterised by polarisation. There is a growing lack of trust in institutions, leaders, corporations, and governments. Tensions and potential conflicts exist between elites and masses; nationalists and globalists; experts and laymen; facts and feelings; the misunderstood and the authorities. For the author, we need to find the right operating system for the digital society, perhaps by accepting a shift towards a horizontal networked distribution of power.

Author: Doug Stephens

What: A second reading of Doug Stephens’ book from 2017 with a critical mindset

Why it is important:  One must admit that his approach and conclusions proved many times right.

Doug Stephens is a consultant specialized in retail. He founded Retail Prophet, after having spent 20 years in the industry, including the leadership of NY store chain Janovic. He is a keynote speaker, TV and radio contributor on the future of commerce in addition to being a writer. His publications include : The retail revival (2013), Reengineering retail (2017 – second reading at IADS), Resurrecting retail (2021).

Introduction: is retail dead?

Doug Stephens starts by dissociating 2 types of retail activities: Commodity goods and “Experience economy”. These terms are widespread and commonly used. However, for him, they are missing a point, which is why he provocatively quotes Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape, who famously said “software eats retail”.

Amazon represents half of Walmart’s turnover, and was founded in 1999 (Walmart in 1964). For Stephens, it is software which radically changed retail, thanks to the rise of e-commerce and new usages (e-commerce represented a market of 1,5 trillion dollars in 2015), leading to the appearance of giants such as Amazon and Alibaba. They clearly came to eat retailers’ cake, and, to make things worse, these new players do not limit themselves to retail: they encompass every domain of activity related to customers’ interactions, to the extent of Amazon becoming a competitor even for UPS and Fedex.

What can retailers do? They have traditionally relied on advertising to promote their activities. However, the multiplication of devices on which customers can stay informed and keep connected, media became abundant, and attention scarce. In other words: gone are the days when it was worth paying or buying advertising spaces to show products. Doug Stephens mentions the example of Woolworth which invested significant budgets to reach a total of 700,000 Facebook likes over a period when it welcomed at the same time a total of 21 million customers in its stores, ridiculing the social media strategy.

Media is the store

For Doug Stephens, the answer to this now-impossible advertising equation is to change the paradigm and consider that the media is the store: there should no longer be any friction or divide between the message about the product, and the ability of customer to buy the said product. Doug Stephens illustrates his thoughts by mentioning several examples: Amazon’s dash button, and the possibility to buy / replenish via a device, Virtual stores, VR, 3D printing and chatbots. All these initiatives contribute to enable customers to shop, without having to come to a physical store. So, coming back to the introduction, does this mean that retail as we know it is dead?

Store is media

In a very sensationalist way, Doug Stephens reminds us that shopping is physiological activity that answers to human needs. This is the reason why even DNVBs and e-commerce companies (Amazon, Warby Parker, Everlane) end up opening physical stores: to answer this need.

However, despite being a necessary activity, retail as a whole became dull, with boring experiences provided by retailers obsessed by sales by square feet metrics, instead of thinking about what the customer really wants. As a consequence, retailers end up playing in the same field than Amazon, i.e. they sell products, and do not see that the purpose of a store is not any more to do so. Doug Stephens illustrates this transition from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach with a few examples: emphasizing co-creation of products by retrieving customers’ data and opinion, or immersive experiences.

As a whole, Stephens advocates to replace the sales per square feet KPI by the Net Promoter Score, more adapted for him to the new world. After all, the store should be seen as a part of the brand content (this is what Apple does, leading it to welcome 1 million shoppers a day in 2015).

Stephens does not resist to push (and to illustrate) strong catchphrases: “no more omnichannels but more moments”, “less inventory, more inventiveness”. All in all, what he sees is the death of the wholesale model, which is not adapted anymore to the new customers’ journeys and the need to rethink the industry’s business model (he mentions as an example Story in NY, which since then was closed).

Stephens also makes a whole list of technologies which are here to support the fact that retail is becoming “show business”: facial recognition, beacon tech, emotional tracking, technological fitting rooms, interactive signage, superior membership and subscription programs, mobile engagement, RFID, clienteling, video analytics.

This business model shift leads to 2 consequences:

• A change of role for sales assistants, becoming brand specialists if they want to escape automation of their previous positions,
• A change of paradigm, from a world where the retailer was the customer of the brand, to a world where the brand is the client of the retailer.

Going further

Doug Stephens makes a comparison between the pre-digital and post-digital world, to see what changed:

• From a world where alternative product options could be difficult to be found, to a world where customers have an infinite choice,
• From a world where mediocre retailers could survive, to a world where new competitors are not even coming from the industry, and are disrupting the chain value,
• From a world where you are identified by what you sell, to a world where you are identified by how you sell.

In order to survive, Doug Stephens advises retailers to fuel innovation at any costs, challenge existing scripts and look to achieve a x10 rather than a +10%. How to make that possible:

• By thinking in network, not in empire, to stay agile, flexible (über or markeplaces models)
• By benchmarking laterally rather than comparing to the market
• By engineering everything and controlling the customer’s experience.

Post Covid-19, the book is still very much relevant, and if one could regret the sensationalist tone of voice and few examples that do not exist anymore today, there are still many points or illustrations that are valid to keep in mind for the fast-approaching post Covid world.

Buy it on Amazon here