Navigating the New Retail Landscape

The retail industry globally is in an era of profound, perhaps unprecedented, change. This book is intended to serve as a wide-ranging, robust, practical guide to leaders of enterprises tasked with understanding and delivering success in the new landscape of retailing, as well as to all those with an interest in this most important and visible of industries.

Part 1 describes the major directions and drivers of change that define the new global landscape of retailing. Accelerating changes in technology, the rise to prominence globally of internet enabled shoppers and the rapid emergence of entirely new retail enterprises and business models are combining to re-shape the very fundamentals of the retail industry. The new landscape of retailing is unforgiving: success can be achieved more quickly than ever before but failure is equally rapid. Opportunities in the new landscape of retailing are profound, but so too are the challenges. Part 2 discusses the structures, skills, and capabilities that retail enterprises will need if they are to be successful in this new landscape and the skills and capabilities required of the leaders of retail enterprises.

Thirty detailed case studies of innovative and successful enterprises internationally and more than one hundred smaller examples, all updated and many entirely new since the first two editions of this book, are used to illustrate the themes discussed. Frameworks are presented to provide practical guidance for enterprise leaders to understand and contextualize the nature of change re-shaping retail landscapes globally.