This holiday season (and year) has been unlike any other. Has any other year pressure tested every system, capability, process, resource and bandwidth limits simultaneously? Now is the time to assess your retail strategy, review your playbook, and think about your KPIs. Retailers and brands have permission from their customers right now to implement unprecedented levels of change. This is the opportunity to rethink and reinvent what the future looks like for retail, whatever brand or business you’re part of, and incorporate those ideas into your goals for 2021.

In our final podcast of the 2020 Retail Wrap-Up series, Joe Cox, Director of Communication Strategy, talks with Kristin Demel, Retail Strategy Director, on the biggest “aha” moments uncovered in the past holiday retail episodes, the three key takeaways for retail in 2020 and how retailers and brands can be intentional, versus reactionary, in 2021.

Listen here:

Other podcasts in our Retail Wrap-Up 2020 series include:

• Retail Wrap-Up 2020: Why this is a one-of-a-kind holiday season





• Retail Wrap-Up 2020: Stop saying omni-channel





• Retail Wrap-Up 2020: Shopper modes are the new purchase channels 





• Retail Wrap-Up 2020: Will Black Friday ethics lead to retail innovation?

Joe:
Welcome back to Uncovering Aha, a podcast devoted to helping brands transform data into action, to inspire creativity, to accelerate the growth of your business. I’m Joe Cox, director of communication strategy at Callahan. And today’s podcast will be our … hard to believe it’ll be our final podcast of this very special year of 2020, as well as the wrap-up of our 2020 Retail Wrap-Up series. So, wrap up of our wrap-up.

Joe:
And with me, I’m joined once again by Kristin Demel, Callahan’s director of retail strategy, who has been tirelessly commentating this, how you say, extremely distinct holiday shopping season, giving us the inside scoop from the perspective of retailers so that you and your own team can come out of this whirlwind season with some really specific learnings and actions that you can transfer to how you tackle 2021 and beyond.

Joe:
So, Kristin, this is it. This is the wrap-up of the wrap up. And in this episode, we are going to be taking the highlights of the previous episodes in our retail holiday season wrap-up series and delivering those big ahas that we uncovered along the way. We have three big overall learnings for everyone. And so, Kristin, whenever you synthesize all of those conversations we had in our entire place, what are some of the things that stood out?

Kristin:
Yeah. Hi, Joe. I am so excited to be back talking about holiday. It’s the Superbowl for retailers as you move through quarter four, and so it’s always exciting to see the strategies come to play, and I think never more true than this year as we’re all kind of quickly reacting. But I think the thing to keep in mind as we start to talk about learnings is this first learning is that while everything’s been different this year, and we’ve all learned and we’ve had to pivot and we’ve had to come up with new strategies and new tactics, this is really just been an acceleration of retail trends that have already been in the marketplace. And that is exceptionally true for what’s happened this holiday season.

Kristin:
I think the three highlights here, the first one is we’ve already had this migration where customers are shopping earlier. We’ve already had this sense of the holidays blurring between Thanksgiving and the December holiday season. I think what’s accelerated and new this year is that Halloween got looped into that, too. So now Halloween and Thanksgiving and the December holidays all became one big fourth quarter holiday blur. And Black Friday used to be the start of the season and almost became that Pavlovian stimulus, that bell that we all reacted to and said, “Oh, it’s time for the holiday season,” that just moved up into October with Prime Day.

Kristin:
So while it felt new and different and created a lot of reactionary behavior out there from brands and retailers, it really was just continuation of what’s been happening in the holiday season. I think as we start to think about Black Friday this year, and as we think about it in the future, it’s going to be less about a day and a weekend and more about a state of mind. Black Friday. Now, to me doesn’t mean Friday after Thanksgiving. It means, “Ooh, it’s time to deal seek and time to shop as I prepare for the holiday season.”

Kristin:
The second big acceleration is the shopping outside of physical retail. You can’t avoid news articles that are saying holiday online shopping is hitting records. Black Friday hit records online, or Cyber Monday and Cyber Week hit records, et cetera. We see crazy statistics about how digital sales have climbed versus last year. But that was already something going so that continues to be just an acceleration of a trend.

Kristin:
And then I think that the third thing here related to acceleration of retail trends is really around, I’m going to call it alternate delivery. You could call it curbside, buy online, pickup in store, third-party delivery, that last mile delivery that’s happening. But this also, to our point we’ve been making, is an acceleration of a trend that was starting to happen. When you look at all of the retail experts that are posting articles and content out there right now, Retail Dive published an article on the winners and losers of Black Friday with curbside and digital being some of those winners, in-store traffic being one of the losers. Store traffic’s been quoted over Black Friday weekend being down 50%.

Kristin:
But again, not surprising knowing where consumer behavior was for this year, but also knowing what’s been going on in the retail environment for the last several years.

Joe:
Yeah, this is one of my favorites, too, because this is the one that I really got it and it really coincides with a lot of the other trends that we’re seeing in marketing that are outside of retail world, is that what 2020 did, was it hit the fast forward button. It’s that acceleration, right? It did not put us into a state of everyone had eight months, nine months to start something, to build something from scratch, which it kind of seems that way. That’s not how the medication or the cure for the pandemic worked. It didn’t get started. It got started years ago. Right?

Joe:
So, but what we did see is that fast forward button happen, and I think that it makes a ton of sense. And I am really kind of looking forward to not seeing all that attention on Black Friday or a day, but a lot of creative … like a lot of things open up to me if I was within retail to be able to … Where do we fit in, and how do we see the retail season and holiday season? And how does our consumer see the holiday season? So I really dig this one because I can mentally see that fast forward button and, and what it means to not only retail, but other industries too.

Joe:
So what about the second learning? What was the second one that you took from our conversations?

Kristin:
Yeah. So the second learning I would say is stop thinking about your customers channels because the customers don’t think this way. It’s never been more blurred across channels than it is right now. I would say most retail organizations were set up and structured in a way where there was separate teams, almost a binary concept in retail. You had your brick and mortar team and you had your, well, e-commerce team. And that’s the titles of the teams and that’s the way that folks were thinking, and app development and social shopping and all of that kind of just fell under that e-commerce shopping.

Kristin:
But customers don’t think that way. And so designing your customer experience, designing your brand engagement in a way that connects in a binary fashion, either with customers physically or customers digitally, is just not going to work going forward. And so I think that that really becomes that big second learning. As you start to look at Retail Dive published a few days ago their retailer of the year, which became Target. And I’m a big Target shopper, sad to … Not sad to, but will proudly claim a big Target shopper here.

Kristin:
When I think about how I engage with Target, I don’t have one set of expectations for