Gary Hawkins has been enmeshed in the retail industry for nearly three decades as a practitioner and advisor for companies ranging from Hy-Vee to Kroger, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and NCR. Every step of the way, he has provided the industry with timely and thought-provoking content, educating the market through works like Building the Customer Specific Retail Enterprise; Customer Intelligence; and Retail in the Age of I.
For his latest book, Bionic Retail: How to Thrive in an Exponential World, Hawkins has explored the gap between technology’s rapid evolution and retailers’ slowness — or in some cases complete lack of willingness — to adopt it. After all, as the CEO of the Center for Advancing Retail & Technology, he has seen his fair share of retailers struggling to keep up with the industry’s rapid pace of change.
“I drew on some of my experiences as a retailer, focusing on loyalty and using customer data,” Hawkins said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “What really triggered me to write Bionic Retail was that retail executives were inevitably focused on the next cool thing, the next shiny object and the next innovation. In my mind, they were missing the bigger picture of what’s behind all this innovation and what the implications are.”
The most significant of these implications, according to Hawkins, is that the pace of change is much more “exponential” and that it’s “accelerating faster and faster,” creating a growing gap for retailers scrambling to keep up.
Hawkins offered the following tips to help retail organizations set a scalable path for innovation in today’s exponential world:
Tip 1: Admit the “same-old” practices no longer work
“Retailers need to let go of the mantra, ‘Well, we’ve always done it this way,'” Hawkins said. “Many of these established practices have made retail successful for the better part of a century, but they may no longer be best in this new world.”
As a result, Hawkins recommends retailers set some of these “tried-and-true” practices aside, so teams can expand their creative boundaries and consider the benefits of new tools, technologies and practices.
Tip 2: Ensure your people and processes can support new tech investments
A retailer could invest in the latest, most cutting-edge tech, but these investments will quickly fall flat if the culture isn’t designed to support testing, learning and innovating. Hawkins experienced this culture gap firsthand as he helped his former company, Green Hills, develop its customer loyalty initiatives.
In many cases, the technology works great, but the people don’t accept it, Hawkins noted. “In those cases, you have to let the value of the technology speak for itself,” he said. While educational opportunities and training are important, team members should also experience the technology on their own so they can realize the benefits.
And while every project and initiative is different, Hawkins noted that every success story starts with C-level buy-in and commitment. These executives set the tone for an initiative and ensure everyone is aligned and rallying around the same goals and vision.
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Tip 3: Unify your data and systems to create a cohesive and comprehensive innovation path
Silos are a common challenge in retail. Hawkins compares retailers’ growing stack of solutions to a “technology hairball” that is only getting more complex. “You’re trying to make everything work together, and what companies like Walmart are doing today is bringing all their data together into a unified data foundation to make it available to anyone across the organization,” he said.
“Doing that makes it far easier to deploy new AI applications on top of that data,” Hawkins added. “They don’t have to worry about point-to-point integrations because they can access that data through standard APIs and interfaces — and the benefits of that are immense.”
Eliminating such “technology hairballs” makes organizations operate more efficiently and makes it easier for teams to deploy new tools and capabilities.
