DynamicAction is thrilled to be featured in the Women’s Wear Daily Thought Leaders Lab Special Report: Succeeding In Retail’s New Landscape. The 2-hour Thought Leaders Lab session occurred in June in WWD’s New York offices with some of retail’s brightest minds,  including DynamicAction clients: Sahal Laher, chief digital officer and chief information officer at DXL, and Charlie Cole, global chief eCommerce officer at Samsonite and chief digital officer at TUMI.  The session also included Matt Corey, chief marketing officer at PGA, and Elaine Rubin, president of Digital Prophets Network. DynamicAction's own CMO, Sarah Engel, facilitated a conversation that focused on the key points of friction impacting businesses and the strategic infrastructure and alignment that retailers must deploy in order to navigate to customer centricity and profitability.

Key takeaways include:

• Strategic leadership and new metrics: Traditional approaches no longer produce the results necessary to sustain and grow retail businesses. Retailers must have a synergistic alignment from the C-suite down to the store employee level centered on an authentic vision and consistent customer engagement. In addition, leadership roles and key players on the retail team need to be digital-first in their thinking.
• The customer journey and profitability: Retailers and brands need to place the consumer at the center of their strategic planning and execution in order to form a meaningful, lasting relationship with shoppers. They must think like their customer in order to deliver a powerful and seamless engagement from first click to final delivery. Perhaps lead with content and connection over the sale, as one will naturally lead to the other if customers understand your unique value proposition.  This all stems from retailers properly harnessing the tsunami of data in order to understand what is important to their specific customer’s experience.  Organizations can no longer keep stores and digital in silos—customers don’t think in channels.
• Team alignment and data centricity: Re-alignment throughout the entire business not only requires a clear vision, but a commitment from C-Levels and the board for a full buy-in to the customer engagement strategy that can yield higher returns. Forward thinking retailers have established a digital mindset as their "base layer” that aligns back to the overall vision of the brand and champions to help it to succeed from store employees and managers all the way through to their the site experience. While data and technology alone are not a full strategy, leveraged properly they will add a competitive advantage and enable retailers to make nimble decision in order to offer a better customer experience and protect profit margins.

The full article from Women's Wear Daily is available here.