NRF 2020: Top five game changing technologies

Vinit Doshi, Senior Expert at Periscope By McKinsey, shares his observations from NRF’s The Big Show 2020.

Technology in the retail sector evolves at a rapid pace, and there is no shortage of places that a retailer could invest for their future. The good news is that, from what I witnessed at NRF 2020, the retail sector now seems to have realised it must accelerate investment in and experimenting with technology.  

This is an important decision to reach, as technology is disrupting every interaction in the consumer-retailer-manufacturer chain. Data, sharing it, analysing it, and using insights gained to inform better and faster decision making has been a central tenet of how this chain has evolved over the last decade.  

Automation too has been critical to the evolution of retail, whether ordering in supply chains, or analysing data to develop assortment strategies or present real-time pricing/promotions as well as personalised recommendations to consumers. 

But as was evident at The Big Show, there are ever more creative and unexpected ways technology is changing retail, perhaps signalling that both retailers and shoppers are stepping up their game and are making better use of it.

Here were the top five technologies that stood out:

1.  In China, a company has developed a consumer app that allows people to band their purchases together as way to encourage retailers to offer bulk discounts.

2.  New AI visual technologies are allowing retailers to passively observe, track and analyse where shoppers are looking in store, what products they look at, how much time they look at them etc. 

3.  Consumers will be increasingly able to shop online and simply pick up groceries into their cars, with machines bringing products together and making automated substitution recommendations when products are not available. 

4.  Cash registers that can scan groups of products visually and in automated ways (without barcodes), even produce in plastic bags. 

5.  Electronic shelf labels continue to evolve, allowing prices to be changed instantly and additional product information to be presented to shoppers. We can certainly expect to see retailers using this technology with its performance and design flexibility advantages.

Technology is not the only substantial force disrupting retail: social fears, eco anxiety, financial worries, and social disconnection are all changing the behaviour of shoppers and the expectations being placed of retailers.

Understanding the behaviour and needs of customers has been at the heart of successful retail for hundreds of years. Today, we have more information about customers than ever before, and the wider market environment, the challenge is how to make sense of it.  However, in return, customers too have much greater access to data that informs their buying decisions.  

Data is the key to turning disruptive technology to the advantage of retailers. Behaviour evolves quickly, but data signposts those changes, and with regular analysis we have the opportunity to observe them. Therefore, no retailer should be blind-sided by what they perceive as ‘sudden change’ and feel compelled to make knee-jerk decisions.  

At this year’s The Big Show, we saw retailers no longer frozen in the headlights of uncertainty but looking to how they can evolve to meet the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead, setting themselves on a growth trajectory and acting to achieve.  

Other retailers need to now follow suit and see themselves as in a state of continuous evolution, looking for the next tweak that needs to be made to their offering, testing new ideas and learning from them.