While it may be difficult to wrap one’s head around the fact that summer is almost over, Labor Day is nearly upon us. Which – for those of you keeping score – means it is nearly time for the partners here at RSR to announce what topics we’re going to be benchmarking in 2019. Seriously: where does the time go?

Fact is we’ve put more effort into next year’s research agenda (and the subsequent webinar, registration link below) than any year prior. In fact, we’ve spent an enormous amount of summer 2018 on internal calls hashing out the plusses and minuses of virtually every topic under the sun. What we’ve done is keep an incredibly open collective mind, and from this practice we’ve established what – we think – is the most focused research agenda on the market.

Why all the added effort this time around? Because we recognize that we have a LOT of competition these days. Just as retailers are facing competition from all sorts of new sources, so are we. And we get that the value of quality research that retailers and vendors can rely on to make smarter business decisions has not gone down – just the opposite, in fact. But how can we make sure our own content rises above the noise? And the answer to that is simple: we have to keep providing the level of insight that we’ve been providing for 11 years now, but that every step we take has to be  hyper-focused on what our audience needs. And that means an agenda that isn’t just what’s interesting to us, but what we genuinely believe can help you and your company the most.

You’ll have to tell us if we’re headed in the right direction. Because while we know you have a lot of choices on where to get your retail insights these days, we really want to be the voice you can trust the most. We’ve earned our opinions, sure, but that doesn’t matter much if we aren’t giving our community what they know to be useful, objective, and actionable data they can use in their daily business lives.

Sign up for the event and let us know what you think of what we’ll be benchmarking in 2019. And if you think our topics are correct, or outright wrong, or not quite where you’d like to be – let us know. That’s what we value most. Hokey as it may sound, we just want to make sure we’re studying what the market needs most in these incredibly turbulent times.