Hi Folks ! Wishing you all a happy and healthy new year ! Let me take this opportunity to talk about TOP 5 trends which I foresee in Indian Retail in 2023.
1) Omnichannel will be the only way to go : If You are an offline retailer (Covid must have already killed You by now ! Or half killed ! ) or a D2C brand or selling through marketplaces, each of you would know that you can’t survive or scale with just 1 channel. If you don’t go where your customers are , your customers will go to your competition faster than you can imagine ! Be prepared to explore other channel or peril.
2) Technology will be the biggest lever to achieve scale : ‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world’. If you want to be Archimedes of your business domain, your lever is technology, never in entire history was technology so advance and so accessible. Only way to scale beyond a certain point is to adapt technology, be it infusing better demand/supply projection using ERPs or using better collaboration tools to increase efficiency or even giving trainings to retail teams, technology has to be adopted in every problem solving .
3) Personalisation will be the new sensation in town : As customers are becoming more tech savvy, more brand conscious, more educative, they are getting less loyal to a brand. Competition is getting fierce and choices for customers are infinite. Just a good price or a good quality or a good campaign won’t cut it. Personalisation will, today customers want personalised experiences, personalised interaction, personalised support, if you don’t give, they will leave.
4) Prepare for next 5 years of bull run as retail booms, why I’m so confident on this ? Because there are so many trends telling us loudly. I’ll tell top 3 :
a) In Last 100 years after every adversity came years of bull run.1973 oil crisis, 2001 dot com crash, 2008 housing crash each saw years of bull run and many really large companies were started then. 2023 will be the same post 2020 Covid.
b) In last 100 years whenever US went into recession, t+1 year onward saw India boom primarily from cheap capital and low cost oil. Good enough for Indian entrepreneurs ,this time also US already in recession n India consumption is going better than anyone in the world.
c) The new manufacturing n services hub of the world : First China gave Covid to the world and then hit itself harder with current economic policies and restrictions. World needs a new manufacturer & service provider. No other option other than India. With evolving infrastructure, digital payments and rising entrepreneurship will create enormous wealth and huge consumption as our GDP per capita rises fast .
5) Organise Retail and Online will keep eating the pie from traditional Retail, faster than 1 expects:
As overall Retail grows, highest growth will come from Modern Retail & Online. As country gets joined by road, rail and air network , newer towns will be open to modernisation. Every new town which gets connected will see the downfall of traditional n rise of MT & Online.
The author Annu Grover is the Founder and CEO at Zamia
