The post-multichannel world of retail

When I started covering this business about 20 years ago, there was a lot of attention around channel blurring. With supermarkets and mass merchants adding pharmacy counters and expanding health and beauty, while drug stores added more food, the neat lines that the trade had once used to distinguish one retail channel from another were becoming harder to delineate.



In an early column for DSN, I noted that the lines weren’t blurring so much as they had fundamentally ceased to exist — at least as far as the consumer was concerned.



I thought I was so smart.



Sitting in a meeting room at the Renaissance hotel in Newark, N.J., earlier this month, at the Kantar Retail Drug Channel Workshop, I realized that 20 years ago it was only just beginning. Welcome to the post-multichannel world — one of four critical ideas Kantar will be watching closely in the coming years.



Take CVS’ recent launch of curbside delivery, introduced in April in the San Francisco-area, as CVS Express.



“If you buy [something] online through a combination of in-store research and online research, and you pick it up at the curb, is that a store purchase?” asked Kantar Retail chief knowledge officer Bryan Gildenberg. “Is it an online purchase? It honestly doesn’t matter.”



Kantar Retail director Brian Owens challenged vendors in attendance to consider carefully the supply chain implications of CVS Express. “The fulfillment and the replenishment of this is going to be very interesting.”



Twenty years ago convenience was defined by main-on-main location and nose-in parking. Today, convenience is however the consumer defines it. Frequently, that is going to challenge retailers and vendors to think more fluidly about the whole process of buying and selling.



“I think you’re going to be looking at a world where instead of channels, you’re going to be looking at points of influence and methods of fulfillment,” Gildenberg said.



That was just one major takeway from what was an intense two-day program. Kudos to the entire Kantar Retail team on a great event.