It’s Time To Stop Talking Retail Innovation, And Start Doing It
By Tim McMullen, redpepper
“Nike Pushing Retail Innovation”
“Sephora’s innovation ‘gathering speed’ at LVMH”
“Will These Trends Shape Retail for the Next 25 Years?”
These are three recent articles on retail innovation. If you took everything that’s been published about the topic this year, you’d be looking at the figurative tippy-top of the iceberg. It’s been like this for over a decade.
But there are still retailers out there that haven’t started an innovation program for themselves.
They think it’s something other companies do, worry it won’t work for them, or that their organization isn’t set up for it. The truth is that retailers of all types are experimenting in one way or another, from DTC startups to legacy brick-and-mortars. What these companies share (other than being retailers) is having found a way to generate and test new ideas, and implement the good ones. For those that haven’t begun this process for themselves, the prospect can seem daunting, a pipe dream with no hope of becoming reality.
Most retailers don’t realize that they’re perfectly set up to test new ideas. As part of their standard operating procedures, they’re constantly testing new products, tactics, vendors, etc. They work fast. They are used to producing lots of content and bringing it to life in different ways. And they get the concept of prototyping, from pop-up stores to A/B testing shelf height. This is the essential framework needed to test new ideas. The only thing that’s missing then are new ideas to feed into the system, and a new way to measure ROI.
Since most of us don’t think of ourselves as creatives, we tend to limit ourselves from creative thinking. But we’ve found that the people best suited to creatively solve a business’ problems are the ones who work there. This is a reality most retailers need help facing, and often it helps to have a guide to get started. Once this barrier is removed, the real ideation work can begin, and things flow naturally from there.
An important side effect of the ideation part of the process is that it allows you to see things from a new perspective, and helps put you in a mindset for finding new solutions to old problems. Having someone to help you through that makes sense. It’s almost therapeutic, for the people who experience it and the brand itself.
And like therapy, it’s hard to understand the value until you’ve experienced it. It’s not a light switch, but there can be short-term wins that will build confidence. When it becomes part of your business strategy, an element in the marketing/operations flow that is exercised, a muscle develops that can be relied on to lift more than its own weight. Not only will it help you innovate, but it will sharpen your problem solving skills overall.
In retail, the entire job is problem solving, namely figuring out what people are going to want. Retailers spend so much time trying to figure out what’s going to be important to the consumer next. But if you actually co-invented what was next with the consumer (by putting your experiments out into the world in the form of, for example, a store-of-the-future), and had a practice inside your organization focused on that, it would fuel your business.
Bringing customers into an innovation story, to give them a sense the brand is listening and acting on their behalf, isn’t that difficult when you already know who your early adopters/brand champions are — something most brands are already aware of. Every retailer has a small, highly engaged representative audience willing to tell them what the rest of the market would want. Testing with these individuals just makes sense, and builds confidence that new ideas can be validated ahead of time.
And though time is of the essence, it’s not too late, nor will it take as long as you might think to start innovating. You don’t need more research. You don’t need new technology. You need new perspective, and there are plenty of people out there who can help you get it.
Tim McMullen is the founder, CEO, and Innovation Practice leader at redpepper, a creative agency and innovation lab with offices in Nashville and Atlanta. The agency has helped solve innovation and marketing challenges for companies like Deloitte, Slack, MARS Petcare, Verizon, Cracker Barrel, Campaign Monitor and many others for over 17 years. redpepper has been ranked on Inc. Magazine’s list of fastest-growing private companies for six years and has been recognized within the advertising industry with several local, regional, and national ADDY Awards. McMullen speaks nationally on two topics he knows best: company culture and integrated marketing. He has been featured on 60 Minutes, NPR, CNN, Headline News, CNBC, FOX News, and numerous national publications. He was also named the 2010 Agency Marketer of the Year by the American Marketing Association Nashville chapter and is a past president of the American Advertising Federation Nashville.