Have You Shopped In A Smart Store?

We visit a ton of stores, and we're always looking for examples of what we call "smarter stores" -- stores that use networked devices and fixtures to gather and act on customer and product information. Among our current favorites are several Massachusetts-area Stop & Shop grocery stores, where you can test cart-mounted shopping devices that deliver personalized promotions and pay with your Speedpass. We also like Federated's Lazarus department store in Columbus, Ohio, where you will find price scanners, networked plasma screens that display product information and promotional messages, and Web kiosks for tagalong shoppers to use while the power shopper visits the dressing room.

Clearly, there's a lot of technology innovation in retail environments today. But what makes one store smarter may be a waste of money for another store. Retailers need to prioritize their store technology investments based on their strategic challenges and competitive threats. For example, a multichannel retailer that does not yet have fully synchronized product information, prices, and marketing materials across all channels will need to cobble together a confederation of applications to create a smart enterprise content management system. A specialty retailer that still relies on dial-up phone lines to transfer POS data to headquarters must make the case for installing an IP network or risk falling further behind competitors that use real-time connectivity to create a more efficient store. And other retailers may need to upgrade their POS, install self-checkout systems, or add new payment options to improve the customer transaction experience.

In a market where technology spending remains sluggish, retail's focus on building smarter stores provides a bright spot for technology vendors. Retailers will spend 3.2% more on corporate IT during 2003 than in 2002 -- that's above the average increase in other industries. The smarter stores movement spells business for vendors like Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, NCR, Symbol, Texas Instruments, and dozens of others -- provided they play their cards right and demonstrate IQ improvements to pennywise retail CIOs.



Kate Delhagen
Consumer Markets Research Director

P.S. If you've been to a smart store recently, drop me a line at katedelhagen@forrester.com with the information so we can investigate!

Research Referenced In This Issue If you printed this email, get links to the research featured in this week's issue by going to www.forrester.com/go and entering the five-digit number of the report you'd like to read. Analyzing Sam's Club, Costco, And BJ's Shoppers (16546) Benetton Brings Apparel Retail Into The RFID Age (16588) Building Smarter Stores (14478)    Can RFID Payments Cross The Chasm? (16708) Getting The Retail Technology Advantage (14473) No One Stop For Retail Content Management -- Yet (15771) Online Auctions: Not Yet Mainstream (16668) Paying With RFID, Smart Cards, And Biometrics (15406) Picking A POS System (13835) Prioritizing Retail Broadband Site Upgrades (16344)    Q1 2003 Online Sales: Bucking The Retail Trend (16779) Self-Checkout Carves Out A Solid Niche (15219) Tech Spending Profile: Retail, Q1 2003 (16386) The ROI Of Networking Specialty Stores (16095)

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