This week’s NRF 2021, Chapter 1 virtual event kick-started the year for retailers eager to hear something hopeful after all the challenges they’ve faced in 2020. With so many sessions on offer between the start of the event on January 12th through to its conclusion on January 22nd, we thought we’d recap a few of the most important sessions each week.
With the event theme of ‘forward together’ shaping the agenda, NRF’s Vice President of Content and Retail Strategy Jill Dvorak shared that they “looked at six pillars to guide [the event’s] content creation: Leadership, forward-looking growth, new business models, customer, experience, and talent.”
Walmart Weighs in on the New Normal
One of the first sessions of NRF 2021 jumped straight into the challenges faced by retailers because of the pandemic and how they can use these experiences to build back a stronger business. Walmart’s Chief Customer Officer, Janey Whiteside, noted that the company “saw five years of projected growth in pickup and delivery in five weeks.” With more online services on offer and more customers taking advantage of them, Whiteside also noted that this has provided Walmart with an abundance of data. “[w] e can use all that data … to understand our customers better, and to serve them better.”
Want to read the full article? You can find it here.
Social Responsibility is Now an Essential Part of Business
According to the Chief Sustainability Officer of The Home Depot, Ron Jarvis, and President of Ulta Beauty, Dave Kimball, social responsibility is no longer a nice to have part of corporate culture, but an essential part of business success. During their conversation at NRF 2021, Kimball shared that social responsibility is “… a necessity … and it has to be built into the core of the company. It’s driven by consumers making choices about who they want to align with, and from that, you build a strategy.”
The importance of marketing with empathy and connecting with customer values is clearly a defining part of business success in 2021 and beyond.
Ready to learn more? You can find the full article here.
Navigating the Road from Adversity to Success
The consensus during the first week of NRF 2021 is that this year’s adversity will result in long-term success for many retailers. Keynote speaker, Mitch Joel, founder of Six Pixels Group, said that the pandemic affected what he calls “The Great Compression” which has forced retailers to move more quickly on digital innovation in order to create customer loyalty and meet consumer demands. “What we’ve seen is a true acceleration of digital transformation, in terms of innovation and in terms of where the world is at,” he said. “Everything has compressed.”
You can read more about “The Great Compression’ here.
