It has been a thrill to participate in the Retail Week Conference 2012 in London over the last couple of days. More than 1,000 retailers participated, large and small. This on top of the Retail Business and Technology Expo earlier in the week – a separate event.
Both events are better informing my presentations for the upcoming Newsagency of the Future workshop series.
Most of the retail challenges and opportunities discussed in many of the sessions are not dissimilar to challenges and opportunities we face in Australia. Some of the solutions discussed are fresh.
What was most interesting was the discussion about the future of the High Street. This has been a hot topic in the UK for years and while there has not been much progress that they are at least discussing the migration from the High Street to the out of town centre puts them ahead of Australia.
The topics covered which are borderless include: challenged retail business turnaround strategies, omni-channel retail, High Street reinvention, being smart with technology, economic challenges, technology led disruption, employee engagement and big versus small retailers.
It never ceases to amaze me how much effort and time (and money) that Mark Fletcher puts into our industry.
He goes to places that you would expect
our ANF CEO to attend.
WERE THERE ANY OF OUR PAID EXECUTIVES AT THE CONFERENCE, MARK.
June this conference was probably not on the radar of anyone else in the newsagency channel.
I am pretty lucky in that through Tower I have the ability to get to conferences like this one and that being a newsagent I can take on the evert through the eyes of a newsagent.
While associations get caught up in considerable day to day stuff on behalf of newsagents, as they have to, I see it as important that we look more beyond this on strategies for the future. This is why I have travelled so much over the last six months at tenting conferences and participating in retail studies.