ASK THE EXPERT
DOUG STEPHENS, CONTINUED
“Essentially, as a business owner or leader, your
job is now to determine how to put your company
out of business before someone else does. If you
can do that, you've just discovered the new model
for survival.”
customers with a better option that the status quo. Playing it
safe just makes you the slowest gazelle in the herd when the
lions attack.
In the face of this kind of competitive pressure, the best
thing that conventional retailers and brands can do is purpose-
fully and aggressively disrupt themselves in order to innovate.
Essentially, as a business owner or leader, your job is now to
determine how to put your company out of business before
someone else does. If you can do that, you’ve just discovered
the new model for survival.
P: How does your book help retailers navigate the future?
S: There’s no shortage of data and information on trends.
That’s why I wrote Reengineering Retail with the intention of
going beyond simply identifying what’s happening and to
address what businesses, big and small, need to actually do
about it. The entire final quarter of the book offers a guide to
breaking the inertia that many businesses experience and works
to help them innovate and move forward.
P: What kind of research did you have to do to discover
what we can expect for retail in the next decade?
S: While it’s obviously important to be keenly aware of what’s
happening in the retail industry, I’ve always felt that it’s equally
important to look at the broader societal landscape to see how
consumer behavior is shifting. Consumers don’t operate in a
vacuum, so it’s important to watch things like politics,
technology, pop culture, the arts and sciences closely as well.
All these things shape our consumer attitudes and behaviors.
Secondly, I talked directly with many of the people and
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companies that are shaping the future we’re embarking on;
technologists, marketers, data scientists and entrepreneurs – all
of whom are quite literally “reengineering retail.”
P: What makes your perspective on the future of retail
unique?
S: I like to think I bring a healthy mix of right and left brain
thinking to the discussion. One has to be analytical enough to
clearly interpret what’s happening and put it in concise terms,
but intuitive and imaginative enough to picture what it all could
be leading to and what that vision of the future looks like. My
hope is that readers find this balance in my book.
P: What brands do you think are doing retail right?
S: I don’t know of a single brand that I can point to that I could
say is completely future-proof or nailing every aspect of what’s
required. That said, the future is sprinkled widely all around us.
Certainly Amazon is doing many things well – especially in their
innovativeness. Brands like Sephora, Nike and Sonos are pushing
the envelope of what the store can be. Startups like Dollar Shave
Club and Warby Parker have clearly disrupted the scene. And
smaller retailers like Pirch, a unique US kitchen, bath and outdoor
retailer are creating truly immersive experiences.
But it’s also important to note that setting out to “do it
right” isn’t always the best objective either. Sometimes the
brands that enjoy the most success are also the ones that fail
most often. First, because the lessons that failure offers are
often more instructive than those from success but more
importantly, because if you’re not failing, you’re likely not
innovating in the first place. n