I bet you’ve been in at least one conversation — if not many more — that has started from this question:

“What’s the difference between multi-, cross-, and omni-channel, and which term am I supposed to use?”

Often it’s presented with the caveat that the questioner doesn’t like any of the options because they all contain the word channel. At RSR, we’ve often said that consumers don’t think about channels, only retailers do, and such channel-based thinking is half the problem in getting to a more omni-channel experience in the first place. I mean, multi-channel. Or cross-channel. Or whatever.

I’ve even floated the term post-channel and had it shot down because it too contains channel. However, after we had this debate again on our post-NRF debrief webinar, an industry colleague fired off an email in response that really got me thinking. Paraphrasing the email:

“Consumers actually do understand channels very well. They use them all the time, when watching TV and listening to the radio.” (Yes, Tom, it was you.)

Something about the concept he expressed bothered me, but for the longest time I couldn’t figure out what it was — bothered me beyond the concept of radio (Who listens to that anymore? I ask, slightly in jest). However, last week it all became clear, when the following interaction occurred between myself and my daughter Harper, who is eight:

Harper: Mom, I was watching Jessie [a Disney program] and there was an ad at the end for a movie I want to watch, but I can’t find the movie.

Me: Okay, let’s take a look.

Turns out she was watching a recording of Jessie, which she was accessing from our DVR’s list. Harper has figured out the menu search on our DVR, and is constantly adding shows and movies she wants to watch to the recording to-do list. She doesn’t even have to spell all that well — the DVR can somehow figure out what she means and get her close enough to find what she’s looking for. In this case, even though she had gotten the movie name right, the search had no results. So…

Me: Well, let’s go to the Disney Channel and take a look at their upcoming shows. Maybe it’s listed some other way.

Harper: What’s the Disney Channel?

Yes, you heard that right. And you should note that 80-90% of her shows come from one or another of Disney’s channels.

You see, Harper doesn’t watch channels. She accesses playlists that she has customized to her own liking. She does this for TV, and increasingly, she doesn’t even bother with TV — she just watches Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Video on her iPad (Yes, I am a tech parent. My kids have tech.).

In fact, when my children discovered that there is an enormous amount of content available for free on Amazon’s Instant Video thanks to our Prime membership, the TV has been off in our house for almost four weeks straight (Amazon, take note: please enable multiple watch lists or at least tagging within the watch list so that I don’t have to mediate sibling fights over how her H2O: Just Add Water is crowding out his Stargate SG1 or vice versa).

So, while older people like us understand channels and even may have some loyalty to specific channels (in my case HGTV, my trusted source of I’m bored entertainment), the younger crowd may not even understand what a channel is, let alone why it exists. For them, entertainment is about picking and choosing their own content and assembling it into their own playlist. If Harper could build a universal watch list, she’d have content in it from TV, Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube. The only reason she understands the difference between a show and a movie is because the former has multiple episodes.

For some services, her playlist even includes personalized recommendations based on what she has watched and liked, and/or what she currently has in the playlist. When futurists talk about Gen Y as the for me generation, this is exactly what they’re talking about. Harper delights in discovering new shows — but almost all of them are recommendations. Her world exists entirely as her private, personalized, assembled list. Nothing extraneous gets in the way of her experience — certainly nothing so trivial as a channel. And no channel surfing for her. She doesn’t browse. She searches.

The idea of a personalized playlist — mostly built on my own, but maybe influenced by others’ suggestions — is exactly the concept that applies to retail’s future when we in the industry struggle our way through our clumsy conglomeration of channel words. However, I find that for most retailers, this lesson is driven home only when consumers use their mobile phones to expose the retailer’s process and technology gaps (gaping chasms, really) that exist between what’s presented to consumers online vs. what’s presented in stores.

Sadly, I must credit Best Buy with being the first to come to understand the idea of playlist retail, as early as 2004. At the time they called it “co-creation with the customer” and “assembled commerce”. Now, I find that they are a case study in what may happen to any retailer — every retailer — if they don’t figure out how to build playlist retailing as fast as possible — and with a deep commitment to putting the customer at the center of the enterprise.

Call it what you will, this is the future of the customer experience, and the future consumers who will expect that kind of experience are only a few years away from hitting their prime spending years. The window of opportunity for retailers is closing — fast.