Last week, as prelude to RSR’s fourth birthday, we took a look back to see what the hot topics were back in June 2007 when we started the company. This year, as we enter our fifth year, I’d like to take a look ahead.

First of all, we’d like to give you a heads up on what’s in store for RSR. We’re doing a four-year refresh. Many of you have probably noticed the new look of our reports, webinars and speeches. We’ve carried this theme onto our new mobile site (available on Androids and iPhone now, with Blackberry soon to follow). Take a look and let us know what you think! We’re pretty excited about it. Just use our home page URL (www.rsrresearch.com), from your phone and you’ll be automatically redirected.

And by Labor Day, we expect to have a brand new main web site with a similar look and feel. Our current web site has served its purpose, but it’s time to take things to another level. We want to make it friendlier for you, our readers. Along with a new look and feel, we’ll also have enhanced search functions, an easier to use and respond-to blog, and just generally easier navigation.

But enough about us: What about all of our passion, the retail industry itself? Where do we see it going? First up, the future of the store, and our just released benchmark on the state of the store, The 21^st Century Store: The Search for Relevance.

A few highlights (which I assume many of you have figured out — after all, YOU took the survey):

• After a decade of extreme forays into self-service, and consistently lowering in-store payrolls retailers are getting religion on assisted service. They also recognize that an uneducated employee is worse than no employee at all, so they are getting ever-warmer about empowering those employees with technology.
• We also see a lot of converts to the notion of getting the Store Manager back on the selling floor. More of you than ever before are planning to provide mobile technology touch points to the Store Manager, getting him the heck out of the back room.
• Social networks have rocketed up the charts as a way to both bring customers into stores and a way to engage with them when they are IN the store. That’s a dramatic change from last year.

So what will this mean for stores in the next four years? A relevant in-store experience that goes beyond being a showroom for on-line retailers includes the personal touch. Technology will play a part in creating this relevancy, but as the old song goes People need people. Otherwise, it’s just easier to shop from home, the airport, or anyplace else access to the internet can be found.

Part of a satisfactory in-store experience includes being able to touch and feel, and find the product you’re looking for. That speaks to inventory management, and brings us to that old subject — RFID. While RFID on cases and pallets was mostly akin to a solution looking for a problem, item-level RFID for items selling for $5 or more holds a LOT of promise. Think about what bar-codes did for the Distribution Center / Warehouse. For many of us, coupled with warehouse locator systems, it has eliminated the need for year-end physical inventories. That’s a hard dollar savings. A store with every item carrying an RFID tag could find itself in a similar situation: eliminating the need for annual (or more frequent) physical inventories at best, and at worst providing a REAL view into what’s where in the store. Trials have shown that this dramatically reduces apparent but not real out-of-stocks.

I also just sat through a briefing with Checkpoint Systems just today that helped me see how RFID really can help control, quantify and sometimes deter shrink as it happens — in a very practical and non-intrusive way. So I’ve bought into that as a near-term opportunity for apparel and other products. Still, I can’t see full value realized until we can have coverage across the entire store. I guess when I take another look back four years hence, we’ll find out if I was right or wrong.

Next up, is another prediction that Nikki and I recently made in our annual pricing benchmark. We believe that Mobile killed the local pricing star (obscure reference to the first video shown on MTV). Or to putting in plainer terms, localized pricing is moribund. Generally, this excludes what Nikki likes to call “low consideration items “. We don’t see customers checking the price of every can of peas on their mobile phones. BUT….it makes key item pricing even more important. If you’re selling high-end, high-quality organic food but also sell some easily identifiable national brands, being overpriced on those items can ruin your brand identity.

So what’s going to replace localized pricing? We think it’s going to be customer-segment specific pricing. A simpler way to put it (as Nikki does) is the price gets replaced by your price. A bit like loyalty programs on steroids, powered by analytics with that price delivered through a mobile device of some sort that the customer owns.

Last but not least (for this article anyway), there’s omni-channel, all-channel, converged channels, cross-channel, multi-channel, channel-less retailing — pick a name, any name. The bottom line is, the steps of consumer product purchase, from discovery, to purchase, through payment, fulfillment and delivery are only going to become more fractal. In other words, we have to learn to meet our customer, engage our customer, sell to our customer and service our customer through an ever-expanding number of media. What other media will there be in four years’ time? I honestly have no idea. Will Fcommerce (Facebook commerce) become an enduring reality? I don’t think so. But I do think we have to be ready for anything. I’m actually trying to find a term that:

1. Doesn’t mention channels
2. Encapsulates the anywhere/anytime nature of today’s customer and
3. Articulates the value of inventory and customer information as a shared asset available to the retailer enterprise anywhere /anytime IN real time. If you’ve got any ideas, pass them along.

In the meanwhile, happy anniversary to us (thanks to those of you who sent your well-wishes already) and here’s to more fascinating, financially fruitful, and dynamic days ahead for all of us.