Pier 1: Bankrupt

There you go (click here).

You can go back to 2014 and read the positive articles about integrating offline/online and improving the customer experience and providing omnichannel features (click here).

Integrating offline/online ... customer experience ... this stuff sounds seductive. But does it translate to improved File Power? 

Noooo.

Six years ago you had two identical customers ... both loved shopping in stores. One shopped online instead, one kept buying in a store. The analytics demonstrated that File Power did not improve (maybe a few percentage points, a largely useless outcome), but the customer who shopped online now had an incentive to not shop in a store.

• Fewer store visits = reduced store sales.
• Reduced store sales = more discounting to get you in the store.
• More discounting = must discount online as well to be an integrated brand.
• Integrated brand = close stores.
• Closing stores = less retail traffic in general.
• Less retail traffic in general = more store closures.
• Bankrupt.

It's more important than ever to understand File Power, before we do more damage to the brands we manage.