Rethinking Retail Scale and Moving Beyond Multi-channel: Carol Spieckerman's Latest for LIMA

Not that long ago, retailers ran their online and offline operations in silos. In many cases, they actually competed against themselves in different channels. This is a less-talked-about advantage that Apple has held over traditional retailers ever since it opened its first stores in 2001 – Apple understood that it didn’t matter where transactions happened because every touch point along the way kept shoppers engaged with the Apple brand (and, of course, the real brand engagement began when shoppers took the shiny objects home).

These days, retailers from mass to class see all channels — including mobile — as synergistic and seamless touch points with shoppers and, along the way, scale has been redefined. Retailers’ new criteria for scale are no longer thousands of stores, but they aren’t millions of online impressions or mobile transactions either – it’s all of these combined.
Read the rest of the article