Last week, I attended GlobalShop in Las Vegas. I had to double check, but the last time I had attended this event, apparently, was in 2007 — during what is rapidly becoming known as the heyday. It seemed to have been the heyday for GlobalShop as well, because this year’s event was not as big as I remembered it, and the general consensus was that attendance and exhibitors were down.

I went to GlobalShop this year because I was unable to go to the Digital Signage Expo (DSE) at the end of February. From everything I heard, DSE was a fantastic show, leaving attendees with a sense that the long-awaited arrival of digital in-store marketing is finally imminent. Certainly, some recent movement in the industry is heralding interesting times — more on that down below.

But back to GlobalShop. In previous years, I found the content presented at the event to be very compelling — not the kind of stuff I usually get to see. Presenters typically focus very heavily on consumer insights, and how those insights can be baked into design and packaging, and how all of these things are wrapped up together into the brand offering — whether that brand is the retailer or the manufacturer. In past years, it very much left me with the impression that there is a lot about consumer insights that the digital, particularly in-store digital, market does not understand.

This year the content was no different, and in fact, it was critical. Because the consensus is that the Great Recession has left a permanent mark on consumer behavior, and those that focus on consumer insights are just now getting their arms around how these changes will manifest in shopping behaviors. There were several great presentations on the topic, and I can’t do them all individual justice (though you can see my tweets from conference by searching on #globalshop on Twitter or via my Twitter feed). But I can — and will — give you the common themes. Note: these themes were reiterated in one form or another at almost every presentation, meeting, and party, that I attended.

1. Consumer shopping behavior has changed, and it’s not temporary. In fact, one presenter even made the point — and showed some data to support it — that consumers were coming off of a spending spree as early as 2004. The financial crisis merely accelerated and amplified something that was already in play. The ’00s were a great party, but the party is officially over. Shopping is no longer entertainment, nor an integrated part of consumers’ lives — 45% of American women shoppers say they no longer go shopping unless they have something specific to buy, according to Wendy Liebman of WSL. From the same research, 52% say they stay out of stores where they know they will be tempted to spend, and 63% say they have grown used to spending less and have no desire to go back to their old spending ways. Ouch.
2. The changes in behavior do not correlate to demographics necessarily, but there will be a generational impact. Wendy identified 5 emerging shopping behaviors in the post-economy world. They don’t correspond to specific demographics; rather, they follow shoppers’ personal economics, and how they have reacted to the economic circumstances. They range from the shopper who struggles to make even Walmart fit the budget, up to affluent customers who are just waiting to feel okay about spending again. However, in a review focused specifically on Millennials, John Krubski and JP Terlizzi of Medallion Retail made the inevitable case that the Great Recession has had as much impact on the Mils as the Great Depression on the Silent Generation — the ones that came between GI’s and Boomers (much like GenX between Boomers and Mils). These people were teens or came of age during the Great Depression. The biggest difference between Silents and Mils is technology. Ah yes, technology. We’ll get to that in a second. According to Medallion, Mils embody the great divide we’ve seen in retail — they tend to go super-cheap on the things they need, in order to afford the things they want — which is how a college kid living off of $5,000 per year somehow has an iPhone.
3. A new value proposition is needed for retail. The net of points one and two above is that retailers need to do more to position themselves for the new reality — one the includes shifting behaviors that have nothing to do with the demographics they have been assiduously collecting, and one that will be to a large degree defined by the technology and its applications that consumers have in their lives today and will adopt tomorrow. To Wendy’s point, if a great majority of consumers say that even when they decide to buy something in the store, they still take a moment to ask themselves if they really need it, then what are brands doing to make sure that they can ease shoppers through that moment and make the sale? When consumers say they no longer live to shop, how does the retail experience need to change? That is something that needs to cross store design, the cross-channel value proposition (which is rapidly becoming the de-facto brand proposition), and how consumers use technology (whether consumer-provided or retailer-provided). And that leads me back to the title of this piece.

The first time I attended GlobalShop, I thought to myself, “These are the people who really get in-store — they get the mindset of the shopper, and they really understand how consumers see everything from the larger brand proposition of retail, all the way down to its expression at the shelf or at point of sale. “ The converse of that thought, at the time, was that digital people — the agencies and in-store media network and hardware providers — did not get it at all. In 2007, three years after I had started writing about in-store media, we still lived in a world where agency types treated in-store opportunities as afterthoughts and were still trying to cram mass media 30-second spots onto in-store TVs. There needed to be some kind of marriage of the shopper understanding of store and package design people with the media knowledge of digital marketing people.

Digital marketing people have become a lot more savvy since then — which is why I am disappointed that I missed DSE this year. When hardware providers like NEC recognize that they need to provide a full-service, one-stop shop solution, down to content services, and when companies like Muzak are opening a high-end brand execution agency, or NCR has now acquired assets that can cover almost every piece of the in-store puzzle, including kiosk/digital, then you know the world has changed. In fact, based on what I saw at GlobalShop, the world has changed so fast that store designers have not been able to keep up. And that’s a problem. Because now, it’s not the content that lags in digital in-store media, it’s the execution and integration both in store and with other digital assets like web and mobile.

Retailers’ store design teams don’t understand this yet. I spoke with a couple retailers during the show (all members of store design teams), and the consistent theme about technology was “It’s not my job. When I see something cool, I bring it back to my company and try to get it into the hands of the people who own that. ” “Who is that? “ I ask. Shrugs all around: “Store ops, I guess. “ Exhibitors echoed this issue with their prospects and clients.

GlobalShop doesn’t understand this yet, either. It still has a separate digital area that exhibitors are supposed to occupy. Of the handful of vendors in that realm, only about 3 actually qualified as digital in-store providers in my book. The best ones were in the store design area — where they should be. In fact, if I were to design the floor layout for GlobalShop, I would have an entire aisle right between store design and store fixtures, and I would line it with anyone who has a technology component to their offering (and I don’t mean LED lights in the temporary display, either). Because that’s where digital in-store lives — between the branding strategy that is expressed as the overall store design (where technology like digital signage is increasingly becoming a critical part of that landscape), and the tactics of how you make it work in your in-store fixturing decisions. It’s true that there is value in an in-store media-only show, but ultimately, if retailers are going to get it right, it has to be a part of up front strategy and design, much like in-store content has to be a part of the up front media strategy.

Consumers get it, and they’re not waiting around. If you can’t provide a compelling experience in stores, with all of the benefits (like search and in-depth information about products) of online, then consumers will find a way to get it — with or without you. And given their generally surly, hangover-like mood towards retail, I wouldn’t expect a lot of patience and understanding if you can’t deliver, and can’t deliver it right now.