We were talking internally at RSR about some of the changes (or lack thereof) that we’re seeing in the industry – just trying to keep our surfboard in the right place on the wave, so to speak – and one topic that came up was who pushes whom more. Do retailers push vendors more, or do vendors push retailers more? I’d like to riff on that here for a moment.

On the one side, retailers push vendors. I was moderating a panel on price optimization not too long ago, and I asked the retailers on the panel: have you maxed out the capabilities of the vendors you use for price optimization, or do you feel like there’s a lot more that they provide that you haven’t yet taken advantage of? I was looking to get a sense of how mature price optimization solutions were vs. how mature retailers were in using those solutions. The answers I got back surprised me. The retailers on the panel, across the board, said “We are constantly pushing our vendor to do more in price optimization. We have so many more ideas of what we want to do with it than what they are providing today.” I talked with a couple of the vendors after that panel session, and they all shook their heads. “Those guys have barely scratched the surface of what we provide,” one such vendor lamented.

That gap has stuck with me – what a huge difference in perception! How could they be so far apart?

On the other side, vendors push retailers. Very recently, we have spent a lot of time talking about omni-channel retailing. Personally, I have pushed that this is a transformational endeavor that retailers must undertake to stay relevant to the twenty-first century shopper, and I know I’m not the only one out there saying that. In talking to vendors, we get a lot of angst. “We understand what needs to happen, but retailers aren’t making the big changes they need to make!” Naturally, there’s a lot of software and services that need to go into those changes, which is why vendors are anxious, but I find it fascinating to see vendors turning the same complaint against retailers that retailers have long been making about their vendors: “You’re not moving fast enough!”

Yet again, a huge difference in perception, though this one I can understand better. A retailer, mired in the practicality of the day-to-day, looks at a vendor knocking on their door and offering “transformation” and wants to just slam that door shut. There are too many fires already, without trying to get the foundations of the enterprise involved. The retailer’s tendency, in this situation, is to close the door. Meet internally. Figure out where they, as a retail company, want to go, before involving the vendor. If the retailer has the attitude that the vendor doesn’t nearly as much as the retailer hopes, then they don’t see the value of engaging the vendor in discussions that involve striking out in new territory.

But here’s the theme that emerges from these two gaps. Vendors want to push retailers on strategy, because strategic changes mean big projects and long roadmaps and lots of implementation and change management. To be fair, I honestly believe that most of them really believe in the changes that they’re touting. They’re invested in those trends, emotionally, as well as from a product perspective.

Retailers want help with the tactics – they want the 10 features/functions done that would solve so many of their problems, if the vendor would just prioritize those 10 things and get them done. Unfortunately, in a room of, say, 20 retailers, you would be lucky to get a list of 100 things between them all that they wanted done – lucky that it wasn’t a list of 200 things. As a vendor, how do you prioritize that kind of list? It’s nearly impossible, past the first 5 that everybody wants. Not to mention, if the retailers would just tweak their processes, 50 of the things on the list would go away immediately. The solution already does what the retailer needs, if only they hadn’t implemented in such a way as to lock them out of using that functionality.

And so we go round and round. Retailers push vendors and say that their solutions don’t do nearly as much as they need. Vendors push retailers and say that retailers are trying to nickel and dime against something that requires strategic transformation. And they’re both missing the point. Retailers aren’t going to take their vendor partners seriously on the big transformation vision until they’re delivering on the tactics – it’s hard to have credibility about the big things when the small things still fester. And retailers are never going to be done with the nickel and diming around tactical changes until they start thinking strategically about their vendor partners – until they start thinking about how to most closely meld people-process-technology all together, rather than blindly insisting that the system change because the process demands it.

We seem doomed to stay in this cycle until someone actually uses information technology transformatively. I haven’t seen anyone do it yet. I have seen a lot of runs made at it, and it always seems hopeful at first. But then it devolves to Retailer: Can’t you just fix the 10 things I’ve asked for? Vendor: If you’d just transform your business, those 10 things wouldn’t matter.

And round and round we go.