By Karl Greenberg for Marketing Daily
Retail is going postmodern. No, you won’t be seeing installation art at Walmart any time soon. In fact, you won’t be seeing Walmart itself for long — at least not as a generic supercenter-type mega-box. A tech-driven, global and intensely competitive retail world is spinning toward a more focused, smaller, tech-savvy universe.
It’s a place where, in less than a decade, retailers (who survive) will be all over digital retail and mobile technology, and store footprints will shift from gigantic outlets that sell everything to smaller stores focused on specific consumers and their needs. The retail world may, in other words, look more and more like a high-tech version of a street market in Casablanca.
A new report from PwC US and Kantar Retail, “Retailing 2020,” which uses data and analyses from PwC’s retail and consumer practice and Kantar Retail, says stores need to be smaller and better equipped to deal with non-store growth. They also need to deal with the facts of income disparity, and an environment in which classes will define retail channel dynamics.
