And where is the money?

ONLINE IS GETTING MORE SERIOUS

In a situation when the market is not growing, and e-commerce is taking over more and more segments of the consumer market, it is extremely important for traditional retail to clearly understand its business strategy, on the basis of which it is necessary to build long-term plans and implement marketing activities. It was about how to properly build a strategy, including for retail, that was discussed at the conference in MIRBIS during the discussion of the growing role and influence of the relatively new profession for the Russian market, "development director".

How to relate to new technologies, will tell Alexey Pan, expert on strategic sessions, partner of the Russian consulting group "Sustainable Development Strategies".

Alexey, does the failure of sales at the end of 2017 mean a systemic error in the work of traditional retail and the need to go online?

I fully agree that the "sunset" of the era of traditional retail is coming, as well as the traditional industrial economy: everything is digitized, automated, virtualized, "smarter", "spiritualized", "transubstantiated" to the cloud. For Russian retail, this is more than relevant: "Russians will not be able to sit out, hiding from the main development of humanity, no matter how much they would like.

In our practice, we see that traditional forms of trade, like the economy as a whole, are stagnating, while online retail is growing by tens of percent a year regardless of anything, that is, in any crisis and in any economic "bad weather". Offline and online retail – it's like «the torso » and «the head»: offline «the torso» is huge, but static and «decaying», and online«the head» at least while small, it is growing at an explosive pace.

Speaking about retail strategies, it is necessary to distinguish between really long-term strategic objectives and the solution of tactical issues. And if we talk about discounts, then building your strategy on constant sales is a very dangerous way. One of the most successful strategies in retail is the formula "Faster-More-More Expensive-More Often", proposed by the famous Russian marketer Igor Mann, and specific measures and mechanisms developed on its basis, which together will allow the company to sell, respectively, faster, bigger, more expensive and more often".

The further development of traditional retail in our time is no longer possible without the use of online tools, be it an online store or a mobile application, the main thing is that these tools work in close relationship and help companies solve strategically important tasks, form a steady demand and customer loyalty.

According to a Fujitsu study, every fifth retailer was unable to implement a digital transformation project of their business 93% of retailers who took part in the Fujitsu survey said that they have a clearly defined strategy for implementing digital technologies. However, this sector of the economy still lags behind others in terms of the volume of implemented IT projects. This conclusion was made as a result of a global study by Fujitsu "Digital Transformation: People, Actions, Collaboration and Technologies".

The survey, which was conducted as part of a larger Fujitsu research project, involved 189 executives from the retail sector. According to its results, the fear of unsuccessful implementation of digital transformation projects has become a serious obstacle for retailers: 70% of the participants admitted that this circumstance significantly slows down the development of their business. Every fifth respondent (19%) has failed to implement at least one digital transformation project over the past two years, which cost an average of 337,380 euros. In addition, almost a quarter of the participants (23%) have already had to stop implementing digital projects and incur losses of about 182,320 euros.

Despite this state of affairs, the majority of respondents hope for a return on investment and additional benefits from digitalization projects in the next year and a half. The overwhelming majority of survey participants (86%) are confident that their companies have a culture of innovation. They believe that processes and behaviors are the most important factors in the implementation of digital transformations (34%). The second most important factor they call employees involved in digital transformation projects (24%).

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