September 19, 2016

Self-Driving Cars & Retail & Sports


Let's compare and contrast business models. When you go to a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game, what happens?
  • You pay the Brewers for the right to park in their parking lot.
In this version of the future, what is the author recommending for retail?
  • Retail pays you for the right to visit their store.
Can you see what is going on? One set of brands gets you to pay to visit their arena ... your brand (in theory) is going to pay the customer to visit your store. My goodness. Why do we celebrate a future where retailers constantly have to foot the bill for vendors?

Retail has to become MORE like sports in order to survive.

In other words, what good is the retail industry if it is simply a tool for monetizing a driverless car industry funded by wealthy tech gurus?

We already know the answer to that question, don't we? We've spent a decade "digitizing" retail, because wealthy tech folks told us that's what the future of retail is ... and now that we're in the future, we've learned that digitizing retail means less traffic in stores. So with less traffic in stores, the digital elite want driverless cars that retailers pay customers to ride in to visit stores.

At some point, the retail industry will stop listening to gurus ... and will instead figure out how to make retail more like sports, where customers open the wallet to soothe their emotional needs. Without this transformation, smart digital gurus will continue to take advantage of average retail minds.

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