Digital retail management

Hi, I'm John Talbott. I'm a senior lecturer of marketing at the Kelley School of Business in Indiana University, and welcome to my talk on effective retail management.

This particular talk will focus on digital retail, and we'll look at retail and technology adoption. I have an idea that I convey to my students that anything worth doing is worth doing badly, and I'll try to explain what I mean by that. I want to look at diversification of products that are sold online, the physical and digital divide that existed initially, and then talk about integration of physical and digital retail, and then recent developments in digital retail.

So retailers have often been early adopters of technology. The image that you see on the slide is actually an escalator in Bon Marche Department Store in central Paris. This is a technology innovation. And I have seen and used this escalator, and I can tell you that it's quite effective. One can see the entire assortment of the store. Obviously, this device had the effect of allowing the upper floors of department stores to become almost as effective from a selling standpoint as the first floor. So I want you, as we talk about technology, to remember that technology doesn't always have to be a computer or ones and zeros, that it can be simply an innovation that moves people up and down from floor to floor. So as I mentioned, retailers are early adopters. But what I really want to talk about is digital commerce. It's not just an escalator. It took time for traditional stores to adopt and embrace this technology. In the early 90s, digital retail was just a gimmick. Companies had websites, but they were usually only informational, and digital commerce scale was made possible by really ubiquitous high-speed connectivity to the Internet, and this first happened in the workplace. Some of you may have heard the term Cyber Monday. It actually became a thing in the early 2000s because after holiday shopping in the United States, which usually began on Thanksgiving, workers would come back on the following Monday and use their high-speed internet connections to shop at work. Today, Cyber Monday continues to exist and has propagated its presence around the world, despite the fact that Thanksgiving isn't a thing everywhere. So from 1997-2004, I was VP of marketing at Fossil, a watch company and accessory company, and was part of setting up a for-profit and commerce-enabled website in the fall of 1998. And I can tell you that it was a catastrophe and that the website's and the ability to house them and run them has improved significantly since that time. So I mentioned earlier about the idea of