Welcome and Introduction to PRC 2022

Research Presentation:

Crafting INDIA-Bharat’s Growth Roadmap through Phygital : Trends and Strategies That Can Help Retailers Conquer the World’s Biggest Consumer Story

The playbook for Phygital growth isn’t one-size-fits-all. To top it, the savvy India and aspirational Bharat offer very different sets of consumers, markets, and opportunities. Every brand brings something unique to the table, whether it be through their mission, values, product lines, experiences or communities. In addition, phygital now offers so many new channels and paths for expansion, creating a multitude of methods for businesses to expand and scale. If you want to take your Retail brand to the next level, this is the place to get market intelligence and new ideas from top growth marketing and research experts to conquer the market that is the culmination of INDIA+Bharat.

Technopak / PwC / Bain

PRC Patrons Address:

How leaders from four different arenas are leading markets for Growth.

• Amazon
• Reliance Retail
• Blackstone – Nexus Malls
• Arvind Fashions
• 10 serious indicators that Consumerism is at play
• Sales figures (statistics) that reinforce the India consumer story : as World’s sixth largest growing economy
• India will take its spot as the world’s THIRD largest economy within this decade – what is the message to the brands (globally) who are watching from the sidelines and still haven’t made up their mind to mark their entry into India
• The brand appreciation story – what sways the customer today – the interplay of value, price, emotional connect
• What kind of consumption is growing where
• The story which these brands want to play out in India, how are they innovating, and what they are doing in the next 3 years to fuel this story
• What are the global headquarters of these brands saying to these India heads, when it comes to importance of India as a market in the overall global portfolio
• HR, Tech, Distribution, Product – what’s changing with Phygital. And what consumers, employees, and suppliers are expecting

INAUGURAL SESSION:

‘India – Bharat: Exploring the World’s Biggest Consumer Story’

Referred to interchangeably as Bharat or India, the world’s sixth largest economy is a marketplace that is both lucrative and highly scalable. While consumption and retail growth in urban and semi-urban India continue to surge, much of India’s heartlands — “Bharat” — are also rising fast as vast consumer markets — and future retail hubs.

Indian retail market is the world's third-largest consumer market, where 65% of discovery happens online, 97% of shopping takes place offline. The winner will be one who can offer an affordable, high-quality experience both online and offline to a billion people. A recent article stated that there are 70 million online shoppers in India, of whom only 10 million can be classified as 'digital natives'. These numbers mean that today in a country of 1.3 billion people, less than 1 per cent would be considered to be digital natives.

How do we power the transformation of Retail in the dual and complex market of India/ Bharat.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

Putting the Mojo Back in Retail

INSPIRATIONAL TALK / FIRESIDE CHAT:

Dancing with the (Retail) Devil : The Art of Starting Over

It's a fact: retail is not easy to crack and there have been many spectacular stories in retail. Your idea takes off with aplomb and then takes a nosedive. Many ideas in retail have had illustrious beginnings and then fallen on hard times. But what has mattered is the indefatigable spirit of these entrepreneurs / professionals. How they picked up the pieces and wove the story again. And here the PHYGITAL element had a tune to score.

Featuring a great turnaround story: Snapdeal, Blinkit, Vikram Bakshi

2023’s CEO AGENDA: THE LONG VIEW:

How Retail CEOs Are Managing Their Strategic Priorities

1. Opportunities and Challenges in Navigating the INDIA+Bharat Opportunity     
2. Resetting Retail through Relevance, Creativity & Brand Purpose in the Age of PHYGITAL
3. Building Something for Everyone: India’s five household income categories (elite, affluent, aspirers, next billion, and strugglers)
4. The Challenges of Managing a cyclical Pandemic flare-ups, Supply Chain Disruptions, Inflation

It can almost be called the age of RETAIL 4.0. Challenges abound by the dozen. But so are the opportunities. And a lot of it has been created by the world’s most lucrative market that is India+Bharat, and magnified by PHYGITAL.

The coronavirus pandemic was thought to be a once-in-a-lifetime test of business continuity planning, but with repeated and almost cyclical flare-ups, how can CEOs adapt it into their operational playbook.

Consumers today have a renewed desire for relevance, community and belonging, and they want their brands to reflect that. The consumer is not simply asking themselves “What do I want?,” but rather, “What is relevant to me, what do I care about, and what should I care about?"

The industry is being confronted by a string of questions, arising from supply chain disruptions, an uncontrollable bout of inflation, and the great divide in India-Bharat psyche: – What’s next?
– What has changed in consumer behavior and what impact will it have on businesses? What’s the New Normal going to be?
– What changes are likely to persist and which of them are reversible?
– Phygital – has it really moved the needle or remains just another buzzword?

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Your ‘Phygital’ Fitness Test: Is Your Business Ready to Serve Your Customer in 2023

How to Lay the Phygital Foundation For Your Business and Getting It Right the First Time What Are the Metrics to Check Before You Can Say – My Business Checks All Parameters to Be Called Truly ‘Phygital’

Session Focus: Phygital Architecture

Amazon’s expansion into physical stores reflects the diverse needs of customers today. A phygital retail strategy provides customers with a fully-integrated shopping experience. It aims at uniting user experiences from brick-and-mortar to mobile-browsing and everything in between. Hence, phygital—an amalgamation of the worlds physical and digital.

Rather than a strategy to boost sales, a phygital approach looks to provide customers with a fulfilling, vibrant and engaging experience of the brand or product. Such an experience would be built around a series of interactions.

A customer browsing a product in a physical store may be unsure of whether to make the purchase. Does she possess the ability to scan the product on the retailer’s app, and make the decision to purchase it later, at home, in a different size?

If a customer has made an in-store purchase, does she get notified on her phone, when a similar product is released, either online, or in a physical store?

These are a few examples of how an phygital model provides a seamless experience, built around a series of interactions. How do you build these elements into your business to satisfactorily say that your business is truly ‘phygital’.

PANEL DISCUSSION:

How Phygital Can Help Build a Culture That Constantly Delights and Surpasses Expectations

Building a Cohesive Customer Experience : Reimagining Customer Experience (CX) to Drive Loyalty

Session Focus: CX

A recent Harvard Business Review article noted that “while e-commerce will continue to be an essential element of retail strategy, the future success of retailers will ultimately depend on creating a cohesive customer experience, both online and in stores.” While ecommerce sales will continue to grow, Euromonitor research indicates that 78 percent of all purchases will still be made in-store by 2024. Google’s research “shows the pandemic has made people more flexible about whether they buy online or offline” with 73 percent of people in their study saying they are channel-agnostic, compared with 65 percent pre-pandemic.

How can retailers weave this interplay and build a cohesive “phygital” world that we are all living in today?

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Click-and-Mortar: Building Future Ready Businesses through Phygital

Session Focus: Omnichannel : Offline-Online Expansion

For winning a phygital gamepoint, it really depends on if you are playing both sides of the opportunity. A lot of companies continue to go online even if they have a brick-and-mortar presence. 

Do you have a storefront property? 
And how can you expand your storefront by also selling online? 

And then if you don't have a storefront property, how do you increase your brand awareness to get people to go to your website versus going to a competitor website or to a brick-and-mortar business?

For the complete footprint, you have to think beyond plain e-commerce, even beyond omnichannel – PHYGITAL is the only way to completely satisfy your customers. How do you go about achieving that?

PANEL DISCUSSION:

How Phygital Can Help Carve Out Luxury’s Next Frontier

More than any other sector of retail, luxury has relied on human interaction and the personal touch. This has led the sector to take a cautious approach to digital, but change is on the horizon. Bain predicts that by 2025, 30% of all luxury purchases will be made via digital channels.

Drawing on their combination of experiences, retail veterans with phygital prowess, share their unique perspectives on:

• Embracing a new generation of consumers demands for a personalised & frictionless shopping experience at every touchpoint
• Leveraging the profound shift in consumer behaviour to build more meaningful and lucrative relationships with customers
• Effectively marrying online and offline operations to communicate the brand message in more immersive and memorable ways

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Building the Retail Throttle: Maximizing Growth Potential through Phygital for India+Bharat
Capturing all levers of consumer engagement for driving sales
Session Focus: Growth Marketing

Maximizing both online and offline to fuel each other has become one of the top priorities of retailers today. How can you use the different forms of marketing to draw the interest, build conviction, generate positive reviews, and build repeat purchases.

• Experiential marketing, or engagement marketing, that encourages consumers to not only purchase a brand or product but to experience it. How to build Experiential marketing campaigns  that draw out emotional responses from your audiences.
• Social media marketing creating content for different social media platforms to drive engagement and promote your business or product.
• Influencer marketing by enlisting influential people to endorse or mention your brand or product to their followers on social media

PANEL DISCUSSION:

DESIGN is the new ReTail: Reinventing The In-Store Experience Digitally
Session Focus: In-store Design and Experiences

Design shaped museums like Louvre, monuments like Eiffel Tower, modern buildings like The Empire State Building. But today it shapes the STORES. Going forward and for the foreseeable future, the trip to the store or mall will need to be worth our time and energy.

With convergence as the buzzword, digital converging with Design is becoming more of a source of inspiration and engagement for physical stores. We’ve seen some incredible new tools and platforms designed to support contactless commerce, community engagement, displays and even product up-sells inside stores.

There are so many examples of intentional store innovation and there are brands doing creative things to blend their digital and physical spaces. We dig into the trends and real-life examples that will bring physical retail to an entirely new level.

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Fulfilling Your Phygital Supply Chain Promise to Your Customer : The New Era of Supply Chain Execution & Orchestration
How To Build the Modern Age’s Hyper-Local Distribution System
Session Focus: Supply Chain

Supply Chains and Distribution have outgrown from their earlier purpose of delivering a parcel to an address, and now nothing less will do than offering a slick, interactive, immersive and highly visual phygital experience.

The day we promised a ’10 minute delivery’ (and made it happen) has come.

This means retailers need to prioritize resilience, real-time intelligence and transparency in their supply chains. Customers nowadays demand not only shorter delivery and fulfillment cycles, they also want faster, deeper and more accurate insight into the whereabouts of the goods they seek. And they expect an integrated, smooth phygital experience to connect the dots from inquiry to configuration and selection of options, fulfillment, and in-use service issues. In a supply chain context, meeting that expectation will require a variety of intelligent Industry 4.0 capabilities and approaches.

How can the retailers maintain top-of-the-industry standards and configurations in their Supply Chain and Last Mile Fulfilment benchmarks – earning their first milestone to building a happy customer?

Retail talent Disrupted

Reimagining Human Resources for the New Age of Retail: The future of connected Phygital Retail demands a new future of HR
Session Focus: Talent Transformation and HR

New business models, technologies, and changing expectations of—and by—the workforce put HR into focus where it can play a new and vital role in shaping the way retail enterprises compete, access talent, and show up in the communities where they operate. Retailers talk of transformation and adaptation to the current phygital retail environment. These company transformations will require great technology, but it will also require the human element—a culture and workforce that is ready to move forward.

For example, It takes more than just technology to build the store of the future. How do you build a company-wide mindset and values that will drive innovation, and an understanding that innovation must be a constant. Many retailers say the reason new technologies don’t take hold in stores is because associates don’t feel connected, and don’t see how it improves their own lives.

Let us discuss the challenges and opportunities that Retailers face today and how to turn them into the biggest plus points to become an ‘Employer of choice’:

• Retail HR Challenges of 2022 and How to Overcome Them
• What’s the new possible: How HR Can Help Build Top Talent for World-Class Retail Organizations and Get Them Ready for Phygital Era
• Developing a new HR strategy along the four tenets:
  • MINDSET: From doing digital to being digital - how we design jobs, organize work, and plan for the future growth. Embracing new traits and behaviors that allow the retail workforce to thrive in the digital age
  • FOCUS: From process-driven to human-centered solutions
  • LENS: From compliance and control to trust and empowerment
  • ENABLERS: Unified engagement platform that promotes productivity and simplicity of experience. Social collaboration that can allow organization to truly reinvent.

Rethinking Loyalty For The Phygital Age

Session Focus: Loyalty

Today, customers crave experiences & surprises. So traditional discount and points-based loyalty programs are obsolete. How do retailers use the masses of customer data at their disposal to build deep customer relationships that truly inspire long-term customer loyalty? 

Our panel will take a deep dive into best practice in: 

Overhauling loyalty programmes to make them more flexible and holistic

Creative ways to increase customer touch points

Embedding relevant experiences and customer perks into loyalty programs

Leveraging data usage for personalisation and targeted communications

PANEL DISCUSSION:

The Art of Igniting Curiosity: New Approaches to Marketing for INDIA – Bharat

Session Focus: Digital Marketing, Branding

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Making Better Business Decisions : Big Data Is Still Your Best Friend Accelerating Data-Driven Experiences Across All Channels

Session Focus: Big Data / Analytics

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Creating A Growth Marketing Mindset : Where Phygital Can Help and Accelerate the Process

Session Focus: Expansion and Scaling Up

PANEL DISCUSSION:

Strategies for Scaling and Expanding

Session Focus: 1x to 10x Growth

SOLOx / Retail CEO Spotlight:

Breaking Conventions to Build Extraordinary Businesses

PANEL DISCUSSION:

How Malls Can Help D2C Brands Grow Further Stores Inside Malls – The Next Driver for D2C Growth

Session Focus: D2C Expansion strategies – Store portfolio growth

D2C Brands from across Fashion, Accessories, Footwear to Personal Care, CDIT and Home & Interiors categories are launching exclusive offline retail destinations as they embark on the next stage of their growth journeys.

Click & Mortar: How this is becoming the Next-Gen Retail Model for D2C Brands to:

To build omnichannel customer experiences

To drive brand visibility

To boost business opportunities

RETAIL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT HEADS TOWN HALL:

Communicate & Collaborate: Let’s Get Physical (Again) with a Dash of Phy-gital