There has never been a shortage of external challenges pushing retailers as they seek to get the right product to the right customer at the right time. The retail world has been complicated enough for decades. But for Retail Winners, the new consumer’s behavior patterns are only adding force to those existing pressures.

Check out what they told us were the top Business Challenges facing their supply chain execution efforts in our latest research, New Requirements To Meet New Demand. You might just be surprised.

Figure: Focus Is Everything

Source: RSR Research, October 2015

What’s quite telling about this data, however, isn’t just how Winners – no doubt more focused on a customer-centric selling model than their underperforming peers (it’s a large part of what’s aided in their Winning, after all) – are feeling more pressure from the new consumer. It’s also every bit as informative to notice the areas where non-Winners (average and lagging retailers) more frequently place a higher emphasis.

Notice the third and fourth data points in the figure above: non-winning retailers are much more likely to attribute business challenges to their competitors, depicted here as competitive pressures to achieve same-day fulfillment, and to create shorter order-to-delivery cycles. Fretting over competitive pressures has long been a hallmark of lagging retailers, but in these particular cases, it is especially dangerous.

Consider the data points at hand: same-day-delivery is an enormously difficult undertaking, and in many ways only makes sense for certain products or in certain markets. Should a retailer mark this as a must-do simply because one of their competitors is working toward it? What if it is a geographically unsound target for their specific audience? As is always the case, it makes far more sense to work towards goals that fit your consumer base’s unique needs, rather than looking over a shoulder at what competitors are up to. It’s a trap that Winners consistently avoid.

Instead, Winners are more focused trying to understand what new fulfillment ideas for their specific customer base will have the most appeal. They know channels don’t really exist in consumers’ minds anymore, and are focusing their efforts on discovering what “responsive ” will look like in the near future.

And this is not the only difference that emerges between performance groups in our latest benchmark report. We invite you to read the full report to learn the whole story.