Every year, in an attempt to highlight major themes at NRF and provide information to the retail community, RSR produces a Big Show Debrief. To get content for this webinar, we roam the NRF Show floor and have conversations with retailers and vendors to get a feeling for the types of applications available in the marketplace. We make an attempt to see and highlight vendors that we don’t engage with on a day-to-day basis, and we mention these vendors in our webinars in order to provide concrete examples of trends we see at play in the larger market. However, mentioning a vendor in a webinar is never meant to be an endorsement, implied or otherwise, of that vendor.

To be completely and 100% clear, we don’t EVER endorse any technology vendor, whether they are clients or not. This is so important to us, and so core to our company values, we decided as a team to take this opportunity to re-explain our mission, values and ethics to you.

We formed the entity that became RSR because we saw a crease of whitespace in the Retail Analyst market. There were, and are good firms that provide competitive intelligence, either through quadrants, waves or vendor roundups. There were, and are firms that provide approximate market sizing for various types of technologies. There were, and are firms that can talk about theoretical best practices. We respect those firms and what they do. There was no need for another like them.

What was missing was analysis that tied the business challenges and opportunities retailers face to the types of technologies they deploy. So our mission was and remains straightforward, “to elevate the conversation about retail technology to a strategic level within the enterprise. ” To achieve that objective we have three major tenets that infuse everything we do:

• Objective insights with no competitive intelligence or system selection practice
• Pragmatic advice to both retailers and solution providers
• Maintain a continuous bed of broad research data into retailers’ technology investment plans and the business challenges and opportunities that drive those investments.

This is not an easy line to walk, especially since we get a majority of our revenue from technology vendors who want to sell their products to retailers. We’ve also had to turn down some very lucrative assignments, mostly revolving around system selection, because we don’t think that runs in the spirit of our objectivity pledge.

Could we actually do a system selection? Of course we could. We’ve been part and parcel of these selections in the past, either as CIOs or consultants. In fact, our fourth tenet talks about our deep retail domain expertise. But we must remain true to our mission statement.

If you need help creating a roadmap (either as a retailer or a vendor), that’s core to what we do… help align IT strategies with winning retail behaviors. We’d love to help. If you need an education into how the retail enterprise actually works, that’s another area where we shine. We’ve helped many large and small companies get their feet wet with retail, among many other services we provide.

We can do these things really well precisely because we are completely objective and to be anything else would make us hypocrites at best. We want retailers – and solution providers – to focus on establishing successful long term relationships with each other. To focus on co-creating value and making the consumer experience the best that it can possibly be.

Our objectivity is paramount to this value proposition, and our continued pledge to you.