MEDIA RELEASE 18 May 2010
The five retail trends to hit Australia
The Australian retail environment is continuously evolving to adapt to the
economy, customers' shopping needs, brands' marketing initiatives and so on.
Traditionally, the Australian retail industry has borrowed many ideas from its
North American counterparts.
David Evans, CEO of SPOS, a provider of marketing at retail solutions, attended
GlobalShop 2010 in Las Vegas in March and identified five retail trends which
will soon make their way down under.
Trend #1 - Customers are informed
Shoppers have permanently moved from impulse buying to information. They want to
find information about the product they are thinking of buying without being
'annoyed' by sales assistants. So it's important to make product data available
right next to the product. Interactive technologies like digital screens and
self-service kiosks are great tools to achieve this.
Trend #2 - Customers are looking for immersive experiences
Customers tend to shop in many stores before deciding which one to buy from and,
in addition to this, they also buy online. They have become omni-channel
shoppers.
So a critical factor to success for retailers is to create new levels of loyalty
or a reason for customers to come back to their outlet. One way to do this is by
creating an 'experience' for the shopper. Interactive merchandising like the MTI
Solution allows shoppers to actually try the product before buying it, thus
getting a real first-hand experience. A camera retailer, for example, would be
able to keep its cameras safely out on display and powered so shoppers can take
photos with them and look at various options the cameras offer.
Self-checkouts are another way to create customer loyalty because they speed up
the buying process. Anecdotally, Australia is the country that has adapted more
quickly to self-checkouts.
Trend #3 - Integrated merchandising
Small and large retailers alike are introducing systems that are fully
integrated to their POS system to save management time and ensure consistency of
data across the board. They are looking for a system that can automatically
produce the right promotional signage and shelf edge labels in the right media,
in the right store, in the right quantity, showing the right price, in the right
order and at the right time.
As a result we will hear less and less about customers asking for a huge
discount because the label indicated the wrong price. Integrated merchandising
ensures that when a product is scanned at checkout, it is the same as the price
on the shelf and the same price is also on the website.
Trend #4 - Instrumented execution
To increase economic efficiencies, there is an increasing tendency to instrument
the whole sales process from shelf merchandising to checkout to help with dense
and timely data acquisition. For example, RFID tagging of apparels and
temperature sensors on perishable food items have become very popular in the USA
and the UK and we will see them increasingly in our Australian outlets.
Trend #5 - The sustainability discourse has temporarily died
Sustainability was on all retailers' mind before the financial crisis. And
although a US research indicated that 88 per cent of brands and retailers want
to develop more sustainable initiatives, they do not want to pay for the changes
that would be required.
We will see retailers engaging again in the sustainability discourse within the
next X months.
SPOS is a leading provider of marketing at retail solutions in Australia and New
Zealand, creating and supplying effective point-of-sale materials designed to
enhance the overall appearance of the products in-store and ultimately stimulate
sales.
The company sent a delegation of 10 staff to the GlobalShop, the tradeshow for
retailers and brand managers to discover the latest in retail design, in-store
marketing and the best technology for the in-store experience.
More information about SPOS is available at
www.spos.com.au or by calling 1800 263 988.
Released for SPOS by Dennis Rutzou Public Relations (www.drpr.com.au)
For further information please call Kim Larochelle or Nicola Rutzou on (02) 9413
4244.
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