Top Articles to Read This Week: Analyzing Retails Digital and Physical Future

News of the retail apocalypse has been circulating for many months and its true that a great deal of brands have been shuttering lots of their stores, but this is not the end of physical location shopping experiences. In fact, many companies are still placing their bets on physical locations, notably Amazon with their Whole Foods acquisition. The retail experience is indeed changing, but not going away.

Instead, it is being reshaped by digital integration and a sense of community. The consumer of the future is interested in the experience and the storytelling that the retailers can provide in person more than the convenience of online shopping.Here are the top articles to read this week:1.

The AmazonWhole Foods Deal Means Every Other Retailers Three-Year Plan Is ObsoleteBy Darrell K. Rigby from Harvard Business ReviewRetail has long been moving into the fusion of digital and physical experiences, but until the Amazon-Whole Foods deal, this was always a plan for the future instead of now. Amazon has made it clear that it wants to sell everything and there is precedent from Alibaba in China that they can enter more physical spaces beyond groceries.

This means that retailers must now rethink their future initiatives to be faster than Amazon through agile innovation and better through expense management.2. In the Amazon era, debating the store of the futureBy Hilary Milnes from DigidayThere has been a lot of talk about upgrading brick-and-mortar stores with modern tech to make them more accessible, but merely adding AR smart mirrors doesnt scale and doesnt bring results.

The store of the future is less about high tech implementations and more about the customer of the future and digital platform integrations. Essentially, its all about the experiences provided to the customers and the data that the stores can take away from these experiences.3.

The Retail Apocalypse Might Just Mean the Reinvention of the Shopping ExperienceBy Patrick Sisson from RackedA better way to think about the retail apocalypse is as a sorting of the stores who have adjusted to the current retail environment and those who have not. Storytelling and community is more important than ever in this environment how were the products made, where do the materials come from, who made them, etc. ?

The human factor is the reason that people still go to physical locations, and brands are honing in on that notion.4. Coke AI strategy takes its cue from StingBy VB Staff from VentureBeatHow a customer moves through a store can predict their purchasing activities, or at least, thats what Coca-Cola is betting on.

Using on-premise beacons in physical locations, the beverage company is gathering data on the speed and style of movements of each individual shopper. This data will then be used to determine what kind of shopping experience to provide for the customer on that specific shopping trip. Its the literal interpretation of path to purchase.

5. For brands, fitting rooms are the key to unlocking valuable customer dataBy Hilary Milnes from DigidayData is a valuable commodity, and retailers are always looking for new types and ways to gather consumer data. As it turns out, the fitting room is a data mine with heaps of underused potential.

Retailers are now tracking the movement of products from the floor to the fitting room through scanning systems, which can be used to track conversion, offer complete outfit suggestions to the customer, or even place the item in their online shopping cart for later.Curated by Hadley Stork RELATED QUESTION Which custom lighting design manufacturers would you choose to work with (as in, your preferred list of custom lighting design manufacturers for new projects, renovations, and/or construction of a new home and/or commercial property) and why? Residential and commercial lighting are different products.

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