5 Strategies to Keep Your Retail Brand From Suffering the Same Fate as Those Big Box Stores

How is it that we have come to live in a world where esteemed companies like Sears and Macy’s, once synonymous with "retail," are closing countless locations just to stay in business, while Amazon, the pioneering patriarch of ecommerce, is spending money to open storefront shops?

As Rick Gomez, CMO of Target told Ad Age, “The headlines are constantly talking about how retailers are shutting stores and on the verge of bankruptcy. There's going to be a lot of consolidation of winners and losers.”

The question is, which side of the history books is your retail brand going to end up on?

The current physical retail environment may be far from simple, but there are several lessons retail brands can learn to help them flourish in this time of uncertainty when so many of their peers are becoming obsolete.

1. Use big data to give you a competitive advantage.

It’s easy to forget now, but in the pre-digital days of doing business, personal customer data was often hard to come by.

Large companies spent enormous amounts of time and money on market research, while smaller organizations lacked the resources to engage in reliable data collection on a regular basis. This is almost unfathomable today, in an age where personal data is overflowing from the Internet, and most customers are perfectly willing to share their information with retailers. Read more

Firas Kittaneh - Entrepreneur - 15 Dec 2017