Article for Retail Week 27th January 2012 - Blog
Article for Retail Week 27th January 2012
01/02/2012
Mary Mary quite contrary, how does the high street grow?
Mary Portas is Queen of shops, but is she queen of multi channel?
While her recent report on the challenges facing the High St. mentioned the web and mobile, not one of the 28 recommendations made referenced how they can compliment the high street. It felt like a single channel view driven by an old school retail perspective, demonstrated by the statement that “the web was one of the biggest threats to retail on our high streets.” To the contrary, for every person that buys online, around five people are researching online but will buy offline.
The report’s recommendations lacked empathy with customer behaviour. The customer’s journey and where the high street might fit into that to make life a little more convenient would have been a better starting point.
To maintain relevance, retailers need to offer the customer the ability to shop how they choose to do so. And therefore so does the high street.
Customer behavior has fundamentally changed. Being task rich and time poor, convenience is the driver for customers. That’s why retailers such as John Lewis are experiencing faster growth in customers reserving a product online to collect instore than buying online for home delivery. And it’s also the driver for the continual rise in sales through smartphones.
This said, I agree with the points she raised, including some very good ideas such as implementing ‘town teams’ getting town centers working like businesses, and giving communities more of a say over how empty high street spaces are utilised.
Here’s a few of my thoughts on how the high street, web and mobile can compliment each other to help bring more people back to the High St:
• Local councils could support small independent high st retailers by providing websites with promotional capability
• They could subsidize pick up points in local high streets where customers can select to have online orders picked up
• eBay had a pop up store in London over Christmas. Pureplay pop up’s could help landlords fill empty stores
• Councils and landlords could provide cheap solutions for retailers to implement virtual shopping walls such as Ocado and Tesco had in London and South Korea respectively
I agree with Mary when she said “those who see high streets purely as a commercial retail mix need to think again.” However, without the high street being part of a cross channel solution, the customer will choose to shop elsewhere.