Retailers Take Note: A Shark Never Stops Swimming Forward for a Reason.

Susan Reda, the Editor of the National Retail Federation's "Stores" website (www.stores.org) recently published her 2011 predictions for retailers and made the following statement in her article "Opportunity Comes Calling":

The pace of change [in retail] in 2009 and 2010 was nothing short of extraordinary, yet insiders expect that rate to be five times faster over the next two years. The possibilities are both invigorating and frightening — retailers need to transform their business and adapt at the pace of the marketplace if they’re going to survive and flourish.

I think most retailers will agree that keeping up with “the pace of the marketplace” is one of their greatest challenges. Consumer behavior is in a constant change of flux and buying decisions can be predicated on one or many emotional, environmental and economic factors that vary for each individual. A few well known examples include:

• Convenience
• Peer & Social Exposure
• Income
• Generational Experience
• Technology
• Entertainment Factor
• Price v. Value

This is where the shark comes in. The shark is essentially a living fossil and has been on our planet for over 400 million years, and is still (at least in my opinion) the most prolific eating machine in the oceans! If you have ever watched National Geographic’s shark week, you will know that most sharks don’t have muscles that can independently flush freshly oxygenated water across their gills and into their bloodstreams. As a result, they must constantly swim forward or they die.



Furthermore, all that swimming around expends a tremendous amount of energy, so a shark needs to refuel. They do that by eating. A lot. All the time.

For a retailer, keeping pace with consumer change is as essential to its survival as it is for a shark to swim forward. That requires effort and fuel. For retailers, that fuel is not fish and the occasional beachgoer, it is instead identifying ideas and innovations that can help them:

• Make the consumer experience exciting and memorable
• Leverage the emerging and ubiquity of mobile communications and shopping
• Identify “new and cool” products that match changing demographics
• Create and maintain communicative and lasting relationships with consumers
• Increase revenue and gross margin while reducing inventory

Developing and maintaining a pipeline of truly innovative ideas that will help achieve goals is rapidly becoming an emerging business practice for major retailers. Some, including Walmart, Lowe’s and JCPenny have established innovation departments with the sole responsibility of gathering, qualifying and managing ideas that are aligned with their business goals.

They are like the Great White Sharks that hang out near Seal Island in South Africa. They feed where the food is.

These retailers have also established specific policies, procedures, infrastructure and architectures that make the mining and management of ideas highly efficient, which gives their merchandising and store operations leaders timely and accurate data points upon which they make decisions.

These companies are all leaders in their space because they learned from the shark. They are now built to survive and thrive for the next 400 million years.