Addressing the Challenges of Scale: NRF 2020
MarketScale recently attended NRF 2020, the retail industry’s biggest annual show, to get a feel for where the industry is headed and sit down with some of retail’s biggest names.
Infovista Senior Director of Global Enterprise Marketing Ricardo Belmar joined MarketScale’s Geoff Short to discuss changes Belmar has noticed over a decade of NRF attendance and wider trends in the retail world.
Belmar said it’s been intriguing to watch new innovations and technologies enter the industry, though he noted that making that technology functional at all times and scaling it up to match current visions are still genuine challenges.
“The real challenge (is) scaling these things,” he said. “You take technologies on their own – because they’re new, they’ve not been used at the kind of scale that a 300-store retailer or a 1,000-store retailer needs to get the consistency in that customer experience.”
What Belmar calls “enabling technology,” then, is key to achieving this kind of consistency at scale and capitalizing on technological innovation.
Short and Belmar also touched on the wider marriage of technology and retail, the need for experimentation and learning from failure, the differences in technology adoption between small and large firms, and more.
To keep up with everything going on in the retail industry, stay tuned to MarketScale’s retail publication here.
