Last week I went through three big trends that we see for retail in 2011 and beyond: consumer spending blues, the missing green consumer, and customer centricity 2.0. I promised a follow-up on three more trends, and will do that here. However, I just want to point out that I view these three trends as the big three — the first list last week is almost just a build up to the ones that are listed here.

4. Channel Proliferation

So the trend itself is nothing new. We’ve been dealing with the effects of channel proliferation from the day the first retailer opened the first online storefront over a decade ago. But the interesting thing about channel proliferation is that up until 2010, its impact was largely felt only in the digital realm. Sure, online was disruptive to the retail business, but from an internal perspective it was largely about who got all the investment dollars and had the sexier job.

That’s all changed now, and consumer mobile is primarily to blame. How? By bringing online into the store. When the online channel lived primarily online, stores could ignore it. Sure, they muscled the eCommerce team into putting a store locator up on the site, and grudgingly allowed for buy online, pick-up in store once they realized that it actually drives a lot more traffic (and baskets) once consumers get to the store to pick up their online order.

But mobile brought that whole cross-channel challenge home with a vengeance the first day that a consumer showed her mobile phone to a store employee and said, “But Amazon sells it for $20 less. Will you price match? “ Since then, a degree of panic has reigned in store organizations as the digital space finally has broken open the four walls of the store. Stores can no longer participate in omni-channel commerce as merely a destination point for transactions begun online. Mobile cuts through channels with relentless transparency, muddling up the shopping process and collapsing the distance between online information and where the product resides. And stores can ignore it no longer.

Retailers are responding with a mad rush to invest in mobile capabilities. According to our eCommerce research releasing tomorrow (check back to the homepage to get your copy), not only have retailers made enormous strides in mobile capabilities, they have more planned for 2011.

But mobile isn’t the only new channel that retailers are struggling with. Social media, while also not new and not really explosive, still has wrenches to throw into the works, including by melding in new and unexpected ways with other new channels like mobile — as Shopkick’s emergence on the scene in 2010 proved.

In general, RSR is seeing fashion retailers really embracing social media for engagement with customers. They feel somewhat protected from mobile’s threat to price and product transparency because for the most part they are vertically integrated — you can only get Gap jeans from Gap. They see a lot of opportunity for facilitating connections between shoppers and their friends, so that they can quickly get trusted answers to questions like, “Does this make me look fat? “ and move on to purchase. Grocers, on the other end of the spectrum, don’t see as much opportunity in social — but they are very much interested in mobile, and the opportunities for shopping lists, recipes, even special services like product comparison for dietary or nutrition requirements.

But where new channels promise to be the most disruptive in 2011 is around point of sale. Small format specialty retailers are already asking themselves what the point is to their cash wraps — why not take their eCommerce platform, or even a stand-alone mobile POS, put it on a bunch of tablets, and shove one symbolic till (for taking old-school cash) into the corner?

One last thought to disturb your sleep tonight: what if new channels aren’t through proliferating yet? Will there be interactive TV shopping in our future? What about when our cars are constantly connected to the internet — will it give new meaning to the drive-through?

5. Economics of the Retail Model

This is the biggest, most fundamental change coming in 2011. The online channel provides a relatively low cost to serve, and is currently the primary growth engine for most retailers — and getting big enough to be material not just to sales but actually having a material impact on processes that were never designed to support the online model. Stores, on the other hand, represent an enormous investment with a dwindling return — a huge use of capital, a black hole of inventory and labor costs, where stores’ lifespans are often shorter than anticipated, and growing at about the speed of a garden slug. When you take those two realities and put them together, what do you get? You get a lot of ouch.

Let me ask you: what would your cost model look like if, in the span of 15 years, you went from 100% of your transactions happening in stores to 1 in 4 of them happening in a digital channel? If you were starting a retail chain today, knowing that you might run through that kind of change in a time period that is shorter than the lifespan of many retailers’ merchandising or POS systems, would you design your operations the way they look today? Your systems? I’m thinking the answer is no.

And the heavy capital drag of stores is just the beginning — consider: if your customers are researching their product options online before they ever step foot in a store, then what’s the role of the employee in that interaction? It’s not product expert. If the employee doesn’t have inventory visibility or access to customer order information or purchase history, he or she certainly can’t be a customer service expert either. So what’s the point of having them there — simply to keep the products from walking off the shelf? That’s depressing. And what does your inventory model look like if you’re transacting 25% less volume in your stores than you are today?

2011 isn’t the year that we’re going to be able to solve all of these challenges. It’s not even the year we’re going to answer all of these questions. We’re really at just the first stage of kicking retail’s addiction to stores: acknowledgement that we have a problem. Even as late as September of last year I heard retailers say that the store experience in general is still a better experience than online. The real question is: if that’s not true any longer, then what has to change?

6. Opportunities for Growth

So my last trend isn’t really a trend so much as it is a summary of the challenges and opportunities that retailers have, based on trends 1-5. In this environment, particularly in mature retail markets, what is the opportunity for growth? Economies of scale? Walmart and Tesco have already cornered that market. Growth through new customers? In this economy? Not until the job market starts coming back.

What about new stores? Well, they sure won’t be as profitable as they used to be. So then what about new stores in new markets? Sure, that’s always an opportunity. The interesting part about that to me is that there are as many pretty well-established retailers in BRIC and developing markets that are eyeing the US and Europe as there are American or European retailers looking at moving in on China, India, and Brazil in particular. Success in new countries is not guaranteed, as Walmart and Borders can tell you. New formats are also a possibility, but really only a short-term strategy against saturation, particularly in mature markets that are already over-stored anyway.

New chains pose an interesting possibility, provided you can find the right niche. I think we’ll see a lot of consolidation of retail in 2011 as efficient retailers look to extend their efficiencies to niche retailers that plug a hole in their customer segmentations. Acquisition also serves as a much easier entry point into a foreign country’s market.

What about products? We’ve talked so much about the customer, but the product still has to meet customer expectations if a retailer wants to be successful. We’ve certainly continued to see strong interest in private label and product exclusives that are collaborations between manufacturers and retailers. Another interesting option is the services that support and enable the products that consumers purchase. Petsmart has really embraced this as a strategy — some of their stores devote almost as much floor space to services like pet training, grooming, and veterinary services as they do to actual products — an interesting way to make use of space that has been eaten up by online cannibalization.

Riding the Wave

So, a long post, I know, but an important one. If you’re not thinking about these questions already, then I strongly urge you to consider them, and consider their implications for your business.