Retail Tomorrow Podcast Series

Gary Saarenvirta, the founder and CEO of Daisy Intelligence and an authority on artificial intelligence, joins co-hosts Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe to strip A.I. down to its most basic parts – he describes it as "brute force computing" that simply allows business to learn faster "than the pace of time". Forget about how science fiction portrays A.I., he says, but focus on the the opportunities that it can offer retailers at a highly attractive ROI.  A.I., he says, shortly will become "table stakes" for any retailer who wants to be competitive.

Nancy Giordano, one of the country's foremost strategic futurists, join co-hosts Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe for a conversation about the difference between "leadership" and "leadering" (hint: one is a noun and one is a verb), how the transition from one to the other has been accelerated by the pandemic, and how there is no playbook for what effective companies need to do going forward as they move to what Nancy calls the "better next".

Architecture and design can be seen as being at the unique juncture of art and science … and this week's guest, Matthew Rosenberg, founder of M-Rad, operates at an extraordinarily high level of both. He has worked all over the world on projects ranging from 275 square feet to 850,000 square feet, on public and private spaces as well as consumer products that are designed to touch the five senses and create a sense of both inspiration and aspiration. In this conversation with co-hosts Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe, Rosenberg addresses the evolving creative process, the shortcomings and potential of supermarkets, and the challenges of creating spaces that resonate with people.

There is another pandemic affecting many retailers – a competitive pandemic that for years left many complacent or paralyzed, unable or unwilling to innovate to the degree necessary to survive. But then, when the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the acceleration of certain kinds of consumer behavior forced retailers to innovate on the run…though they didn't necessary think of it as innovating; they just thought of it as the bare necessity for subsistence. Today, in the second part of a two-part conversation, Gary Hawkins – who with his son Sterling Hawkins founded and runs The Center for Advancing Retail & Technology (CART) – talks with Sterling and co-host Kevin Coupe about how to implement the building blocks necessary to achieve Retail 4.0 relevance – connected to consumers, contextual to their behavior, and reflecting imbedded cultural values of organizations and their leadership. The inevitable reality is that retailing is being dramatically remade. What remains to be seen is how many businesses will adapt

It was a decade ago that Gary Hawkins, who with his son (and podcast co-host) Sterling Hawkins founded and runs the Center for Advancing Retail & Technology (CART), released a paper about Retail 3.0, describing how the industry had evolved to the point where marketing personalization, contextual relevancy and customer data-fueled brand-retailer collaboration had become critical to survival. Now, with a new paper, Retail 4.0, Hawkins argues that the digital transformation of retail will be breathtaking in its scale, scope, and speed. This digitalization of retail – the industry transmuting into a new, higher-order, ecosystem – will be accompanied by a radically different economic model, disrupting the entire industry.   In this, the first of a two-part conversation, Gary, Sterling, and Kevin Coupe talk about the cultural transformations that must take place within businesses if they are to have any chance of transforming their companies, setting the stage for the next step, which is implementation.

It was management guru Peter Drucker who once said, "Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change, and the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn". Today's RT podcast guest is Terry Hawkins (no relation to co-host Sterling Hawkins), who for more than three decades has challenged organizations to be better at learning and teaching the people on their front lines by designing, creating, and implementing results-producing education systems. This is particularly timely since we are living in a time when the pandemic has disrupted so many businesses that it seems impossible to make internal training and education a high priority.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.  It may be a cliche, but it also never has been more true, especially because the competitive environment never has been more cutthroat. At the same time, technology and the pandemic have combined to create seismic shifts in consumer behavior. What does this mean? Retailers have to compete not just for every last customers, but every first customer. In this Retail Tomorrow episode, Sterling and Kevin use a close-to-home case study to examine what retailers are and not doing to attract new customers. (And at about 12 minutes in, Sterling comes up with a big idea that every retailer ought to adopt ASAP.)

What separates the winners and losers in the current pandemic-centric retail environment? Why are some retailers able to establish themselves as sustainably essential, while others are just momentarily relevant because people had to buy toilet paper somewhere? On today's podcast, Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe re-engage with Steve Dennis, president and founder of Sageberry Consulting and the author of  Remarkable Retail: How to Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Digital Disruption, to continue their conversation about predictions and prescriptions for a post-pandemic future.

This week, in the first of a two-parter, Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe engage in a conversation with Steve Dennis, the author of “Remarkable Retail: How to Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Digital Disruption”.  Published just as the pandemic hit, “Remarkable Retail” focuses on trends and behaviors – both in business and among consumers – that were accelerated by the coronavirus. The discussion focuses on the “eight essentials” of a remarkable retail experience – factors that cut across format and concept, building relevance and helping retailers avoid a descent into becoming "museums of disappointment".

On this week’s podcast, Gary Hawkins – the CEO of CART, the Center for Advancing Retail & Technology – joins Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe to do a COVID-19 technology checkup, diagnosing the problems retailers are facing and prescribing solutions for businesses looking to thrive in the current and challenging environment.

This week's special guest is Craig Dubitsky, founder of Hello Products and now the Chief Innovation Strategist at Colgate Palmolive. Craig talks to co-hosts Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe about his life as an entrepreneur, how that and his inclination to "question just about everything" translates to his work for one of the world's biggest CPG companies, how he works to be accessible to customers, and how math sometimes can be measured in smiles.

The other day, co-host Sterling Hawkins did something he hadn’t done for several months: he took an airplane trip. On this week’s podcast, he talks to Kevin Coupe about the experience – from his front door to the airport, the boarding area to the flight, and to his arrival in Denver,  then back again – and identifies the little moments and big adjustments that characterized the trip and how businesses have adapted to a new reality. The bottom line: the airlines that are working overtime to build up good will among customers have to be careful not to squander it, just as retailers need to think about how they will remain “essential” in a post-pandemic environment.

There was good news and bad news last week. May retail sales were up 17.7 percent, which was a lot better than the 14.7 percent drop in April and 8.3 percent decline in March – and not completely unexpected since economies around the country were beginning to open up. At the same time, one respected model suggested that COVID-19 deaths in the US could climb past 200,000 by October. That's higher than what was projected just a few weeks ago, and seems to be related to a number of  states that are seeing upward trends in newly reported cases. If Yogi Berra was right when he said, “It ain’t over ’til its over”, then it seems pretty clear that the pandemic ain’t over. That’s the starting point for Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe to explore what retailers need to do to prepare for an extended period in which consumer behavior is radically changed, in which business strategies and tactics have to be adjusted for the new normal, and the extent to which the altered states of consumer and retailer reality will be su

This week, Michael Sansolo, research director for two Coca-Cola Retailing Research Councils (and a weekly columnist on MorningNewsBeat.com), joins Sterling and Kevin for a deep-dive into the rationales behind a pre-pandemic planning guide into how to build stores for the future. Using that guide as a starting point, they look at how current economic, cultural, and medical realities are changing that future, making it more uncertain than ever and yet replete with opportunities for retailers with the right mindset. The Council research reports referred to in this episode can be accessed at https://www.ccrrc.org

Lots of companies and business leaders talk about transformation, especially now, as they look to a post-pandemic future. But are they doing the hard work and engaging in the kind of tough and uncomfortable work necessary to make transformation happen? Sterling and Kevin offer numerous examples of how it can work – and some how is doesn't – concluding that sometimes you can't just transform the stuff that's not working, but actually have to transform the stuff that is.  Because it might not work forever.

This weekly series of Retail Tomorrow podcasts features Sterling Hawkins, co-CEO and co-founder of CART-The Center for Advancing Retail & Technology, and MNB "Content Guy" Kevin Coupe teaming up to speculate, prognosticate, and formulate visions of what tomorrow's retail landscape will look like post-coronavirus. This week, Sterling and Kevin are joined by Chris Walton, CEO and Founder of Omni Talk: one of the fastest growing blogs in retail, and Third Haus: a retail technology lab and joint-venture with Xenia Retail, to talk about opportunities both embraced and squandered during the pandemic. Chris refers to the moment as a "retail reckoning" rather than as a "retail apocalypse", and talks about both small and large companies' approach to a changed marketplace. Plus, Chris, Sterling, and Kevin are examples of past prognostications that they got right, and admit to a few that haven't worked out the way they expected.

When the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic recedes, it will leave behind a retail landscape that is likely to be vastly changed. What retailers need to decide is whether their stores will be better for the experience – more in touch with consumers' needs and desires, more focused on providing differential advantages? Or, will they be diminished?– which is what happens when retailers simply hope that things will get back to normal. That's the focus of the conversation with this week's guest – Andrew McQuilkin, the Retail Market Leader as well as a Partner with BHDP Architecture, which you can check out at www.bhdp.com. Andrew, Sterling, and Kevin examine what retailers can do to make their customers both feel safe and actually be safer, and the challenges of retrofitting existing stores and building new stores to reflect changed realities.

In a new series of weekly Retail Tomorrow podcasts, Sterling Hawkins, co-CEO and co-founder of CART-The Center for Advancing Retail & Technology, and MNB "Content Guy" Kevin Coupe team up to speculate, prognosticate, and formulate visions of what tomorrow's retail landscape will look like post-coronavirus. Airlines have one problem – lots of supply, but not nearly enough demand. Retailers have the opposite issue – tons of demand, but trouble in certain segments coming up with supply. And yet, there are lots of lessons for retailers to learn from how airlines have been dealing with the pandemic – about leadership vs. management, about shopper-centricity vs. an operations focus, and about the importance of finding the experience's pain points and doing everything possible to reduce friction for customers.

In a new series of weekly Retail Tomorrow podcasts, Sterling Hawkins, co-CEO and co-founder of CART-The Center for Advancing Retail & Technology, and MNB "Content Guy" Kevin Coupe team up to speculate, prognosticate, and formulate visions of what tomorrow's retail landscape will look like post-coronavirus. This week Hawkins and Coupe focus on the mixed feelings that consumers seem to have about the governmental and business response to the COVID-19 coronavirus and the tightrope that retailers have to walk in order to send consistent messages to their shoppers, keep their own people safe, and alienate as few people as possible. As the country's economy begins to open up – albeit slowly and in fits and starts – retailers have to figure out the shape and dimensions of the world of Retail Tomorrow.

In a new series of weekly Retail Tomorrow podcasts, Sterling Hawkins, co-CEO and co-founder of CART-The Center for Advancing Retail & Technology, and MNB "Content Guy" Kevin Coupe team up to speculate, prognosticate, and formulate visions of what tomorrow's retail landscape will look like post-coronavirus. Continuing bad economic news has been leavened to some degree by some promising news on the healthcare front – a possible vaccine that could come faster than most people expected, and an experimental treatment that could reduce the number deaths related to the COVID-19 coronavirus. But, as the pandemic and its implications continue to play out, questions remain. What new consumer habits are being formed? How sustained will they be? And, what can/should retailers do to meet these needs and desires as they position themselves to be in the right place at the right time in the world of retail tomorrow.