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Creativity and Innovation with Retail

By Nabamita Chatterjee | May 16, 2013

With clutter and other challenges in the retail space, reinvention, innovation and a close understanding of consumers are the keys to brand success in this space, says Haresh Nayak, Managing Director, Posterscope Group India.

Hyperspace's recent study on retail space mapping across stores reveals some amazing facts. A typical kirana store today has less than 150 stock-keeping units  (SKUs) in their store and a typical supermarket carries about 6,000 SKUs. Every day at METRO outlets across the world, more than 1,00,000 employees serve business customers with a wide assortment of up to 50,000 food and non-food products, available under one roof at wholesale prices. With so much of clutter in the retail space, it can be pretty difficult for a consumer products company to succeed today, particularly when retail is your last chance to talk to your customer.

Clearly the world of retail has become extremely challenging - and we have been doing a number of studies and working on different brands and categories to think about how innovation and creativity can spark success.

Creativity and innovation with retail involves understanding the reality of the challenge that exists and the key strategies that you can use to take your organization and team forward into the world of hyper-change that now surrounds us.

Think about the depth of the challenges that exist:

•    Evolving customers: Customers' expectations and needs are changing rapidly, and yet they are more demanding than ever before
•    Loyalty disappears: At the same time that they expect creative perfection from you, they are more fickle and far less loyal …. I'm not even sure the concept of loyalty exists any more for many brands!
•    Competitive pricing: If that's not enough, the impact of the "Competitive Pricing” is such that consumers are coming to view all products as commodities. Without successful value positioning, many brands are quickly losing their distinctive brand image
•     Costs increase: All this is happening in a world in which producers and retailers are faced with a rapid increase in uncontrollable costs…. energy, plastics, you name it! Margins are being squeezed and they are pressured as a result.

Given the above scenario we all need to look at reinvention to thrive in a period of such rapid change: Hyperspace is working with brands to look into some of the areas where we can help brands stand out of this clutter and scenario: Some learning's are shared below.

Hyper-innovation is key
 
Throughout the consumer products world, we are witnessing faster time to market in every single sector. The concept of a product lifecycle is disappearing as products come to market and thrive for short micro-bursts of time. Make sure you've got the agility on your team you need to cope with this reality, and act accordingly.

Get used to evolving consumers

Desires, needs and demands will continue to change at an ever more furious pace, often in ways that won't make sense. Don't despair, learn from it. Take low-carb as an example. Perhaps it was a disaster, a fad and you should have known better! Yet don't focus on the morning after quarterbacking - focus instead on your agility. Did you respond quickly enough? What organizational sclerosis blocked your ability for a quick change? And what should you do to fix it?

Capture the insight of creative new competitors - constantly

Admit this: there will be a lot of folks out there who are a lot more creative than you are. They'll beat the pants off you all the time with quick short bursts of tactical success, while you are still busy marshalling your forces. Rather than losing sleep over their success, study them! Learn from them! And then capitalize by doing what they do - and do it better. Rapid creativity in a time of constant change is the name of the game, and you'd do best to work to obtain the same skills and insight that your best competitors have developed.

Ride the wave of continuous business model innovation

In retail, we are seeing constant experimentation with store formats, brand partnering, in-store displays, logistics and tracking studies and countless other new ways of doing things. Get on board the tornado of change in retail and ride it for all it is worth. You should develop a team that has a finely tuned radar for unique trends, experiments, success stories and innovations. They're swirling around you continuously, they are constantly reinventing the world of retail on a minute by minute basis - and you've got to understand them and capitalize upon them.

From our experience at Hyperspace the only guarantee we can give you is that the pace of change of creativity and innovation will only increase in days to come. We are gearing up for it. We hope you are, as well!
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