Stand Up for Retail: Innovation in a #NovelEconomy

Best-selling author and Salesforce’s Global Innovation Evangelist, Brian Solis, shares retail insights.

“Who’s leading the digital transformation of your company?” If you are like the majority of respondents to a recent poll, the answer was not customers, shareholders or politics. The number one answer, or 74.4 percent of respondents, said it was COVID-19.

The novel coronavirus has disrupted retail as we know it and it is what prompted Brian Solis, global innovation evangelist at Salesforce and best-selling author, international keynote speaker, and digital anthropologist, to coin this new era the Novel Economy.

He told attendees at a Surf Expo Learning Labs webinar titled “Retail Innovation in the #NovelEconomy,” that “in a Novel Economy, the customer is everything.”

As a futurist, he said he spends a lot of time planning for scenarios based on consumer behavior changes and shifts he observes.

“These are incredible times. What these times mean are more than just a new normal. It means more than adjusting to a society where we have to wear a mask when we venture outside, we need to rethink how we interact with surfaces, with one another,” he said.

He calls it the Novel Economy, he said, is because “We are entering a time where the economy has no playbook. There are no best practices of how to think about the future of retail in a global pandemic.”

He said it is difficult to draw insights from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic because the economy was so different then.

“In the novel economy, there is no playbook. There are no case studies, which means you and I are responsible for writing that as we go,” Solid said.

He told attendees that the virus will not vanish, there is no universal treatment or vaccine.

“Until we establish heard immunity, we are probably looking at 36 months of this new normal,” he said.

He advised that business continuity and getting back to normal or surviving isn’t enough. He sees the Novel Economy evolving in three phases.

Phase 1 is about survival, business continuity and seeing areas for improvement. Phase 2 is about looking for opportunities for integration, mastering the new normal and innovation, and phase 3 is about thriving.

“We have to know how the customer is evolving. We have to understand how and why they are changing,” he said.

The role of a futurist is to observe trends and play out those trends and scenarios so people can make decisions about how our future unfolds. “You don’t have to just react, we still have to explore opportunities how to thrive,” Solis said.

He noted that even during the 1918 flu pandemic, each area of disruption led to great innovation.

He shared a report by McKinsey & Co. showing four phases of retail during a pandemic:

1. Preparing for the crisis
2. Navigating the crisis
3. Coming out of the crisis
4. Managing the next normal

He said those steps need to be taken quickly. Even in the Q1 2020 data, he says he could see patterns in incredible shifts in consumer behavior, including.

Digital shoppers drove 20% of revenue growth compared to 12% growth in Q1 2019.

Digital revenue spiked 45% during the final 15 days of the quarter (March 15-31, 2020)

Mobile e-commerce traffic grew by 25% across all industries.

This series of complimentary webinars are hosted by Surf Expo in partnership with Outdoor Retailer, RetailX, ASD Market Week and NY NOW. More information about upcoming webinars is available at www.surfexpo.com/buyer/stand-up-4-retail-webinars.