Retailers feel the heat as e-commerce siphons off sales
Companies that remain structured in silos, viewing data, web shopping and marketing as add-ons, will falter
The start of 2019 has been bleak for most SA retailers, raising questions about the future of the sector. It is uncertain whether there will be an improvement later in the year or whether this is the beginning of a permanent shift in consumer behaviour that the sector could be ignoring at its peril. If the current economic conditions can be viewed as a dark cloud blocking out the consumer, what then lies beneath? Has this cloud been masking a huge shift in consumer behaviour in the retail space? Andrew Jennings, retail expert and author of Almost Is Not Good Enough, recently said that change in retail has never been this fast, and it will never be this slow again. The question then is how to understand this new world in which the consumer moves, a world in which the boundaries are no longer constrained by physical location, payment mechanisms or brand loyalty — in which choice, speed, convenience, health, environmental impact, individualism and personalisation seem to have crep...
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