‘What will become of shopping centres?’ ‘What will happen when customers demand changes?’ ‘Will e-commerce kill the bricks-and-mortar-huggers?’ These are some of the questions that were addressed on a recent seminar with focus on the future of the retail industry.
A long row of examples of the ever changing world around us and new concepts adapted to it danced by – which seemed to disencourage some of the audience.  And that’s my point; many futurists tend to dazzle their audience (on purpose?) with facts and examples and “this you didn’t know, huh?”, which in part serves as  a wakeup call but also can be almost paralyzing.

Of course the future is unknown. That much we know. But it doesn’t have to be a choice between not doing very much different to meet tomorrows demand and jumping on the latest trend to catch those shoppers. Mapping coming customer groups and coming shopping behaviour in an orderly fashion with scenario planning and interviews is not that hard and it will give shopping centre owners the possibility to say something like: ‘We know our future customer is more of a nomad, which we have tried to meet with our new in store e-commerce solution’ or ‘we know our customer wants free wifi, which will cost XEUR and generate XEUR in added shopping/value/revenue’.

So, listen to futurists and customers alike to learn what you need to do to stay in business and meet tomorrows demand.