TechBytes: Three Trends: What to Expect From NRF ‘Big Show’ Exhibitors
Another January, another NRF “Big Show” in New York. The annual meeting officially kicks off on Sunday. Here’s my early take on what to expect from exhibitors at the show:
1. More Cooperation With Retailers
This year, NRF exhibitors are placing a premium of bringing their retail partners front and center in booth demos, meetings, and conference sessions. Realizing that nothing draws the interest of retailers and creates instant credibility like first-person testimony from end users, vendors are including retailers in their presentations like never before.
Of course, vendors are trotting out retail clients in conference sessions to provide first-hand testimonials about how great their solutions work. However, they are also increasingly offering roundtables, workshops, one-on-one interviews and other opportunities to engage with their retail end-users and obtain specific information on exactly how technology is being implemented.
2. More Interconnected Solutions
The notion of seamless retail has been bandied about the NRF exhibit floor for the past few years, but 2015 is shaping up as the year vendors move “seamless” beyond buzzword status to something attendees can actually see, hear and touch. Many vendors are displaying and demoing entire product suites that extend functionality across the enterprise. They are also offering solutions that can be deployed across a variety of touchpoints and channels, providing back- and front-end support for consistent customer experience.
In addition, there is an increased focus on solutions that are platform-agnostic, or at least are certified to work within specific environments or integrate with solutions from other vendors. As retail becomes an interconnected industry, retailers need interconnected solutions. Judging by what is on display this week, vendors appear to be responding to that need.
Enjoy your time at NRF, and hopefully you will come away much better informed about the technologies that will be supporting and disrupting the retail enterprise in 2015. Next week, I will offer some thoughts on the most significant technology trends to come out of the conference.
3. More Steak. Less Sizzle
During the “dotcom” glory years of the late 1990s and early 2000s, vendors offered a cornucopia of celebrities, performances, giveaways and gimmicks to entice retailers to visit their booths. The solutions themselves were often afterthoughts. I still have a small collection of signed sports memorabilia (including a photo of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders) from that era of manic marketing.
Dotcom exuberance has been over for a long time, but it seems that this year NRF exhibitors are really upping their game in terms of providing verification that their solutions can deliver results. This includes a slew of hands-on product demos, as well as interactive virtual and physical replicas of retail IT environments. Retail technology vendors are realizing that potential customers want assurance that solutions work, rather than simply meet sports heroes or win office knickknacks.