Retail Technology Show review - Mike Coupe gives opening keynote speech
Retailers often lose sight of the basics around shopping and tend to “overcomplicate things”, according to Mike Coupe, the former Sainsbury’s Chief Executive.
Speaking at Retail Technology Show, which is taking place today and tomorrow at London’s Olympia, the industry veteran, who stepped down as boss of the supermarket chain in 2020, stated it was important to remember that retail is “very, very simple” as he discussed the future of the sector.
“We tend to overcomplicate it,” Coupe commented. “In the end, what retailers do is they buy or make things, they move them, and they sell them.”
“We have seen, particularly in the last couple of years as a result of the impact of the Covid outbreak, and the supply chain disruptions, that people have quite often lost sight of those retail basics.”
Coupe, who is now Chairman at fashion retailer New Look, added: “In the future of retail, whether the product is physical or virtual, in the end, the fundamentals will still hold true. We buy things, we move things, we sell things... Never ever lose sight of the retail basics.”
Coupe was Chief Executive at Sainsbury’s for six years, where he is considered to have been the mastermind behind the £1.4 billion takeover of Argos and Habitat and was also responsible for developing Sainsbury’s Tu clothing division.
However, his legacy was affected by a failed £12 billion merger between Sainsbury’s and Asda, as well as being caught singing “We’re in the Money” on air when the merger deal was first announced to the public in April 2018.
Coupe joked that the incident is “still seared on his heart” after the footage of him singing the tune from the musical 42nd Street as he waited to be interviewed on TV, was released on ITN news.
Referring to this week’s news that Elon Musk is buying Twitter, Coupe said he still remembers being the number one global trending topic on the social media network in the aftermath of the incident.
The news travelled around the world so fast, he even got a text about it from his youngest daughter who was teaching in Cambodia at the time.
“It shows how quickly things now go around the world through social media, because that clip was played out at twenty past six on ITN news - I know that because it is seared on my heart - and at about half past six I got a WhatsApp from my daughter saying: ‘Dad… WTF’. So that’s my big claim to fame.”
Coupe was giving the opening keynote speech at Retail Technology Show, which is holding its first public event since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, on what leadership strategies retailers should focus on to drive market share in the coming year.
He said bosses needed to maintain the three principles of: ‘optionality, agility and delegation’ in today’s uncertain climate.
Coupe noted that a “whole bunch of businesses” in the world of retail no longer exist following the pandemic due to their lack of optionality.
“Whether that’s because they didn’t have a meaningful digital offer when the world suddenly moved from retailing in shops to retailing almost exclusively online or whether it meant they didn’t have the financial resilience to contain the shock that happened in March 2020, you need to have a level of optionality [to survive].”
Agility is important in a world of “continuous change”, as well as having the confidence to delegate to colleagues, such as letting frontline staff respond to people complaining about a business on social media in real-time, in order to avoid any delays in getting back to a customer.
Customers now also expected a business to “stand for something” in a world of global warming and rapid changes.
“We are collectively setting about destroying our planet, and increasingly our customers, our colleagues are looking for organisations and businesses they can believe in and stand for something,” Coupe concluded.
