Shelley E. Kohan on Stores Chasing the Shopper

“Brick-and-mortar is, of course, not dead,” said Shelley E. Kohan, vice president of retail consulting at RetailNext, an analytics firm that specializes in the retail sector. She rattled off some stats to support her thesis: 90 percent of retail sales come from brick and mortar, 75 percent of consumers prefer to physically interact with products and 80 percent of malls are considered “healthy.”

Despite all that, a dilemma does exist with respect to physical retail: the store is constantly trying to catch up with the shopper. While merchants are trying to deploy technology, the customer often already has this technology. Retailers want to be nimble, as well as integral to the shopping journey of customers who are increasingly channel-agnostic.

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“[They] want to experience the digital retail world while they’re in the shopping environment of a physical landscape,” Kohan said, noting that RetailNext works with more than 200 retailers filling their “insatiable appetite for in-store analytics” and a desire to understand the shopping journey.

She cited a case study the firm conducted with a large format retailer in an attempt to understand what was happening on their shoe floor. Typically, walls of product have higher engagement than floors, but for this store, the walls of shoes had less than 10 percent engagement.

Kohan said that the team came up with recommendations that revolved around factors from store design to layout. The result was that traffic to the shoe floor increased by 49 percent, engagement was up 75 percent and sales jumped by 22 percent.

“At the end of day we aren’t interested in individual shopper paths but overall movement,” Kohan explained, adding that a key area of study is determining what retail in 2020 will look like.

She offered some early insights that ranged from the continued dominance of brick-and-mortar retail to YouTube becoming the preferred social medium. In five years’ time, Snapchat will “be the norm,” mobile wallets will actually be working and retailers will understand the shopper journey at every point.