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The Next Era Of Retail

I’m a strange bird… I love to shop… but I don’t buy that much.

I like wandering through shopping malls and shopping districts… checking out brands… how they’re merchandised… what’s interesting… how it connects to culture… discovering something I didn’t know existed. I actually like talking to someone who knows more about a product than I do… finding a book I would never have searched for because I didn’t know I wanted to read it… physical serendipity fascinates me.

That’s part of what makes retail matter… and it deserves more attention as retail decides what comes next.

One of my current beliefs is that retail’s next opportunity lies in making each customer feel like the entire retail experience was built for them (the end of The Attention Economy… the beginning of The Intimacy Economy). We’ve spent decades trying to capture attention, but the experiences that stay with me are often much smaller. Someone “understands” what I’m looking for and makes it feel like it was made just for me. AI’s bigger opportunity (from my perch) is to help retailers deliver that feeling to more people at scale. This is why I worry about how much of the conversation about AI in retail revolves around internal efficiency, with too little time spent asking what the customer will actually experience. Will this help someone discover something they’ll love? Will it give an employee more time to share their expertise? Will it make the experience feel more thoughtful… more intimate?

I don’t want my purchase history to become the boundary of my imagination… or determine how much I get charged for something.

The algorithm alone won’t win here. Humans are funny that way… sometimes we want the thing we always buy delivered automatically… sometimes we want to wander. The great retailers know this… and we’ve seen the shopping mall evolve in ways we could have never imagined just a few years ago.

What is the next era of retail?

That is the question I won’t stop exploring. Which makes this news especially meaningful to me: I’ve been named one of the 50 members of the 2027 Retail Voices by NRF class (a program from the National Retail Federation in partnership with Rethink Retail). Yes, I’m grateful for the recognition and for the opportunity to contribute to that conversation alongside people who are also thinking deeply about retail’s future. Beyond the recognition, there’s plenty to work on… retail’s need for superior service… more thoughtful experiences (across physical and digital channels)… creating more compelling spaces where customers can connect over something they care about… and, of course, the technology that makes every retail touchpoint feel like it was created uniquely for each and every customer.

That’s the next era of retail that I’m interested in helping to build.

Planning your next retail event or leadership meeting? My business keynote presentations (Disrupting Disruption, Marketing Forward and Present Future AI) have retail-specific versions that are also fully-customizable. Get in touch, and let’s build a session for your audience.

If you want to dig deeper, here’s my recent appearance on the excellent retail podcast, The Jason & Scot Show…

#RetailVoicesByNRF

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.