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Retail Payments: When the Future Becomes Now
March 6, 2013
In three years’ time, retailers expect mobile and digital payments to catapult from almost nothing to a major piece of their payments environment. But they aren’t looking to their traditional payment partners to lead them through this maze of payments change — they expect consumer-focused technology companies to take charge. Why would retailers look in this [...]
The Impact of Mobile in Retail
January 10, 2013
While consumers adopt mobile technologies at a breakneck pace, retailers tell us that mobile’s primary ability is to enhance the overall value of the brand. This is a new development for 2012, and is highly encouraging news. What is problematic, however, is that much of what retailers share in the following pages of this report [...]
WFM 2013: The Store Employee in the Customer Age
December 12, 2012
Aside from the instant gratification that comes from taking a product home after a purchase, it’s the store employee that can make the difference to the in-store experience. Most retailers agree, But most have only just tapped the surface of employee education and empowerment. A strong argument for workforce management disciplines and technology- especially for [...]
Marketing in Retail: Making the Case for the CMO
September 5, 2012
The retail marketing leader currently seems halfway through a transition — reporting in the right place, but without the span of control or influence that will help that leader succeed as retail enterprises transform themselves into customer-centric organizations. And that serves as the primary theme we found in our 2012 benchmark on the state of marketing [...]
Executing on the Promise: Retail Fulfillment 2012
July 11, 2012
In this report, we find the retail world at a decision point. Retailers have managed to isolate their supply chains from cross-channel impacts, but the volume has now grown to the point where it can no longer be ignored. But even more so than the conflicts that arose between eCommerce and stores, we find that [...]
Omni-Channel 2012: Cross-Channel Comes of Age
June 12, 2012
When RSR first started conducting cross-channel benchmarks, our going-in thesis involved testing whether retailers thought multi-channel retailing was an important priority. At the time, not all of them did. Today, we find ourselves at a new inflection point — no longer is the discussion about whether cross-channel is important. Instead, whether they view it as strategic or not, [...]
Retail Supply Chain 2012: Globalization, Localization, and Cross-Channel
March 7, 2012
Supply chain may well be one of the least flexible functions of the retail business. Compared to an ad that can be dropped or a product that can be marked down or recalled, if supply chain isn’t functioning well, the process to fix it can be long and painful. Unfortunately, retail supply chain’s history of [...]
The Intelligent Retailer’s World of Insight
November 16, 2011
In an era of continued global economic uncertainty, rapid response to market conditions is increasingly important. Once disparate departments within the retail enterprise now need to respond as a single organism. An Enterprise-wide BI strategy is vital to enabling this kind of responsiveness. In RSR’s fifth annual study of business intelligence and analytics capabilities, The [...]
The 21st Century Store Manager
November 15, 2011
Most retail store managers today are in a difficult position. Consumers have adopted mobile technologies at a very rapid pace. Store managers are now outnumbered and outgunned by consumers who are better-equipped to solve their own problems and make their own purchase-related decisions, inside or outside the store. Without an empowered store manager the store [...]
Enabling Buy Anywhere – Get Anywhere: The Future of Cross-Channel
July 15, 2011
Empowered by new technologies, consumers now routinely use several channels to make a single purchasing decision. The compelling value of smart mobile technologies in particular is that they are with the consumer wherever she goes. That enables a fundamentally different shopping experience. And it means that for the first time since the barcode, retailers are [...]