FLUID at the eRetail Europe 2017 in Amsterdam

Yesterday, October 4, our managing partner Roman Gebhard attended the eRetail Conference as part of the Amsterdam eWeek.

It was a very exciting and informative day. All got kicked-off with a great keynote presentation from Molly Williams, Head of Innovation & Digitization at Siemens. She talked about the need for digital transformation and outlined the most important challenges while also making sure the team members are taken successfully on the journey. She stressed the importance of celebrating the smaller achievements together: "Eat cake!"

The following presentations outlined the challenges in the field of retail and how to better integrate the online- and offline worlds while offering a more personalised and joyful customer experience.

Today, an unseen array of technologies and a wealth of information about customers is available to the brands and their marketeers. Often, the critical and most difficult task is to steer through the massive data at hand and make sense of it in order to initiate new strategies and implement successful new initiatives for the customers.

It was exciting to see how often user experience design topics and technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, augmented and virtual technologies were discussed in the retail realm. Especially interesting is the convergence happening between digital and physical space. Smart Beacons for example enable user location tracking within a store, thus similar data analysis tools than the ones we know from online can be used.

While these opportunities allow answering to the customer and their needs and wishes, they also pose questions in respect to privacy and creating a „too transparent“ customer.

Other exciting presentations included the talk by Tom Burrow, Senior Director Digital Product Experience Optimization & Milo Maneo, Senior Director eCommerce - Global IT from Adidas as well as the one by Jaana Knuutinen from Nespresso and Alexander von Eerden & Tim Westens from Building Blocks & Swarovsky. Raj Balasundaram of Emarsys was especially interesting to listen to, as he was able to shed a clear light on AI-related topics that helped to demystify these technologies and explained their use through interesting, tangible applications for marketeers.

It is exciting to see how digital design-related topics and tools finally find their way into the retail realm and how the lean, iterative, agile and user-centred approach is becoming an integral part in major corporations and brands. More about the event, pictures and videos at: www.eretaileurope.com