LAS VEGAS -- Convenience-store retailers spend hours, days, even weeks planning for the NACS Show: What do they need in their stores? How can they function better? Which new products will help them succeed in the future?
So it wasn’t lost on attendees of one of the first workshops on the first day of the recent show in Las Vegas that the presenters essentially told them: You’re not thinking big enough!
“Change today is exponential,” said futurist Ari Popper during a session titled Transforming Retail through Innovation. “Companies that don’t change quickly are on the linear path to doom.”
Pointing to once-were businesses like Blockbuster and Kodak, Popper, founder and CEO of SciFutures, said newer companies such as Netflix and Instagram would have once sounded like science fiction or fantasy, and that’s exactly his point.
“If what you’re doing today is not seen as science fiction, it probably isn’t powerful enough to change consumers’ behavior,” he said.
As an example, Lowe’s head of innovation labs Kyle Nel explained how the home-improvement retailer looked at consumers’ challenge to bring all the pieces of a kitchen remodel or home addition together. Using imagination, creativity and once-impossible technology, the company in June introduced its first Holoroom, a virtual-reality space inside its Toronto store that allows customers to “see” how Lowe’s products, tiles, paint colors, etc. could come together in their projects, all done long before a single hammer is raise on the project.
“Someone, somewhere is going to come up with technology that disrupts your business,” Kel said, “and the real question is: Are you going to be the one that’s leading that change or are you going to be left behind?”
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