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Retail, 12/7: Finding Your Place in the Industry

Finding your place in the retail industry is an important part of carving out an identity and charting a path for success. That can mean finding the correct location for a physical building, or carving out a piece of the market alongside heavy hitters like Amazon. On this week’s episode of the MarketScale Retail…

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Finding your place in the retail industry is an important part of carving out an identity and charting a path for success. That can mean finding the correct location for a physical building, or carving out a piece of the market alongside heavy hitters like Amazon. On this week’s episode of the MarketScale Retail Podcast, we’re going to talk to two people who are experts in helping retailers find their space, both in a physical and technological sense.

A SMARTER WAY OF CHOOSING LOCATIONS

It seems like data and analytics-based decisions usually flow top down, but when it comes to retail location scouting, smart retailers are listening to a new voice to make informed decisions: municipalities. “Decades ago, the mantra was location, location, location. You still hear that, but the real answer is customer customer customer,” said Eric Brown, Director of Account Management for Buxton, a Fort Worth-based market research firm.

On today’s episode of the Retail Podcast, we spoke about new ways consumer data is being disseminated at the ground level, where cities are getting smart about using their residents’ consumer data to help drive economic growth.

INNOVATION IN A POST-AMAZON WORLD

As Amazon pushes into profitability after dramatically altering the shipping and retail worlds, many are wondering about the future of other retailers and the technology they use. Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner at Retail Systems Research, joined us to help make sense of the current marketplace, and talk about putting technology in a business context, working on a benchmark for retail innovation, and finally some of the biggest challenges facing the industry.

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