The Carousel of Progress

By Stan Zylowski, cofounder & CEO, Movista

2022 will be a year of renewal and spectacular technological growth for in-person retail.

Retail, as much as any industry, has been morphed by the pandemic. We all know about labor and supply shortages. We have universally considered the relative rise of online shopping and witnessed first-hand the insane drive for BOPUS, delivery, drive through, pull-up, roll by and just plain “Please don’t touch me or my car” service options. What has been far less discussed is the capacity for brick-and-mortar retailers to select, try and buy software. It is a little thing which has created a chasm between the on-line tech and in-store tech retailers and brands have in place. This is not good.

Customer experience lives at the corner of employees and technology. The best laid plans tend to fall apart in the last mile if execution is not trackable and access to necessary resources is missing. Already beleaguered employees become more so when their tasks are unclear, and processes are sloppy. Labor budgets suffer when the lack of data-driven tasking is replaced by “spray and pray” planning. Retailers could see this issue but during the pandemic, buying teams were sent home and stores were often off limit to all but essential employees. This combination of corporate discoordination and physical impediments to in store trial meant many fewer new tools were brought to bear. This reality eroded efficiency gains at the worst possible time.

Ushering a New Era: Next-Gen Retail Solutions

By Jason Hosking, co-founder and CEO, HIVERY

It is imperative for the CPG industry to be far more dynamic and responsive than it currently is. The experiences over the pandemic have dramatically highlighted this need—with huge spikes in demand and supply chain challenges leaving many shelves empty, and consumers bewildered. Currently, the industry is set up to update what goes on shelves once a year, maybe twice—from strategy to planning and then execution.

Aligning assortment merchandising strategies with consumer purchase behavior and responding to change in a timely manner has been the holy grain and focus of the retail category management industry for many years. At the same time, traditional merchandising solutions have remained relatively unchanged since the 1980s, putting more pressure on the natural human decision-making process. These current processes and solutions rely on outdated industry conventions, human constructs and assumptions.

With rapidly changing consumer expectations combined with ever-complex global supply chains, hybrid shopping models and a complex global environment, bricks and mortar retail needs to step up to the challenge. Part of the solution lies in the use of data. We’ve always believed that ‘data has a better idea’. It's been our philosophy from the start. We are part of a wave of next-generation analytics solutions that are set to change the way CPGs and Retailers collaborate. These analytics enable us to accurately simulate different demand signals and their impacts. They are much more fluid and "conversational" in nature, thus allowing us to identify the best action to take to achieve our objectives.