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Emerging Trends in Retail Industry

University of Maryland

Emerging Trends in Retail Industry

Business trends are gradual general changes that end up changing how a business operates. Business trends come from changing factors in the market and business environment for example technology or changing customer needs. Business organizations must keep up with the emerging and current trends in their business environment to remain competitive or to stay in profitable business. Retail industry involves the buy of products from wholesalers or suppliers and then resell them to individual customers in smaller quantities the people want for individual use. The retail industry is made up of stores such as chain stores, supermarkets, variety stores, franchise stores, and others. Retail industry reports high numbers in their sales but face stiff competition from rivals selling similar products. Business organizations in the retail industry therefore must be on the look-out for emerging business trends and find a way to capitalize on them to gain competitive advantage.

One of the current trends in the retail industry is the increased use of technological tools in running the business. The benefits of technology in the retail business include better customer service, more profits, better efficiency, and others. Business organizations use technological tools to collect information for example about their customers, their needs, or information about their market they operate and other areas. The businesses then use the information to come up with data-driven marketing strategies that ensure that they are marketing to the right audience and that they have the products that the customer need to solve their problems. The data is also used in product development where the businesses use the information to stock products that the customer need. With the increased usage of technology systems, business organizations have had to deal with issues such as cybersecurity for both the company and the end-users. The use of technology in business functions has attracted cybercriminals who pose a security threat as they could access and use private business and customer information for malicious purposes. Businesses must secure their systems and keep updating them to remain safe from attacks (Casado, 2015).

Another business trend that retail businesses are adopting in their operations is the increased use of social media tools in their customer relations and marketing. Social media over the past decade has become a core part of people’s lives where it is estimated to have an approximate 50% penetration worldwide. Retail managers have realized that they could reach to a large number of people if they use social media to market their products. Businesses, therefore, create content for their social media pages including photos and videos and the social media users get to view, share, give feedback and interact with them. Strategic use of social media can also have the consumers generating content for the business products which they share and reach an even greater number of people. Social media is also being used to improve customer relations where consumers can raise queries and get help through it. A growing trend in the use of social media is using influencers who already have a large following and paying them to advertise the business products to their followers. Influencers have the skills to create content that people want to watch and they, therefore, have a good platform to promote products (Tuten, 2017).

A third business trend currently taking place is the shift from traditional direct marketing to interactive marketing. Interactive marketing focuses on individual customers where the marketing initiatives are influenced by the behaviors and preferences of the customers. Retail businesses conduct interactive marketing through actions such as personalized content where they use information about a certain demographic to create marketing content that touches the audience on a personal level. Interactive marketing can also be achieved from active participation of the customers through various avenues. Retailers are looking to integrate virtual reality in their marketing which will allow the customers and other interested parties to have more interaction with their products and services (Kinkead, 2019).

References

Casado, R., & Younas, M. (2015). Emerging trends and technologies in big data processing. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 27(8), 2078-2091.

Kinkead, D., & Rangamani, V. (2019). U.S. Patent No. 10,255,609. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Tuten, T. L., & Solomon, M. R. (2017). Social media marketing. Sag

References