Obviously, we were all pretty busy last week at NRF’s Big Show 2015. Brian has the overview. My job this week is to give you a sneak peek into the topics we’ll cover in our post-show debrief next Thursday. For my sneak peek, I want to focus on the store.

In order to do it justice, I first have to back up a step. I often get asked for a list of stores to visit in the New York area. This year there were a lot of requests for small business, innovative formats or business models. In my research, I found quite a few retailers that have focused on monthly events or gathering spaces as a way to bring new life (and traffic) to their store environment.

For monthly events, while the upside may be that you have a whole new store assortment to attract in shoppers every month, the downside is you have to find the time to re-merchandise the entire store every month too. And sure enough, retailers like Story and Dover Street Market were in the middle of that re-merchandising right during NRF.

For gathering spaces, the challenge is a little different. Retailers like Urban Outfitters are experimenting with rooftop bars to attract consumers into the store. If the space is relevant and the food and drink offerings stay fresh, there could be a lot of synergy in attracting consumers for whom your lifestyle offering has a lot of appeal. But it’s also a little bit of a bright, shiny object. A distraction.

There were plenty of those at NRF this year – an awful lot of “smart ” dressing rooms and interactive displays, all loaded up with RFID tags and large format graphics to help bring more of the digital experience into stores. The intent was, in many ways, exactly the same as the rooftop bar or the ever-changing ste format: to keep stores relevant when consumers increasingly do not need to go to stores in order to shop.

The problem with all of these types of solutions is that while they look cool on the surface, they’re really just bright, shiny objects. Distractions. Yes, retailers need stores to become more relevant. And they need to bring more of the digital experience into stores. But you’re just not going to do that with bright, shiny objects. What retailers really need is a strong understanding of their shoppers, and they need care enough about their shoppers to be able to know what their shoppers need – what problems they have that need solving, or at a minimum, what objectives shoppers are trying to achieve.

If retailers want to improve the store experience, they need to help consumers. And by that I don’t need “help them buy more stuff. ” Probably the hardest thing to internalize about retail today is that it is no longer about selling stuff. Selling stuff is an outcome. It is an outcome of meeting customer needs, of being relevant to them. Interactive video displays that are tuned to an RFID sensor pad, or even rooftop bars are not enough.

We have a lot more to say about this topic and more – so don’t miss our webinar on Thursday, January 29th. We hope you can join us!