Gary Saarenvirta, the founder and CEO of Daisy Intelligence and an authority on artificial intelligence, joins co-hosts Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe to strip A.I. down to its most basic parts – he describes it as "brute force computing" that simply allows business to learn faster "than the pace of time". Forget about how science fiction portrays A.I., he says, but focus on the the opportunities that it can offer retailers at a highly attractive ROI.  A.I., he says, shortly will become "table stakes" for any retailer who wants to be competitive.

Nancy Giordano, one of the country's foremost strategic futurists, join co-hosts Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe for a conversation about the difference between "leadership" and "leadering" (hint: one is a noun and one is a verb), how the transition from one to the other has been accelerated by the pandemic, and how there is no playbook for what effective companies need to do going forward as they move to what Nancy calls the "better next".

Architecture and design can be seen as being at the unique juncture of art and science … and this week's guest, Matthew Rosenberg, founder of M-Rad, operates at an extraordinarily high level of both. He has worked all over the world on projects ranging from 275 square feet to 850,000 square feet, on public and private spaces as well as consumer products that are designed to touch the five senses and create a sense of both inspiration and aspiration.

In this conversation with co-hosts Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe, Rosenberg addresses the evolving creative process, the shortcomings and potential of supermarkets, and the challenges of creating spaces that resonate with people.

There is another pandemic affecting many retailers – a competitive pandemic that for years left many complacent or paralyzed, unable or unwilling to innovate to the degree necessary to survive. But then, when the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the acceleration of certain kinds of consumer behavior forced retailers to innovate on the run…though they didn't necessary think of it as innovating; they just thought of it as the bare necessity for subsistence.

Today, in the second part of a two-part conversation, Gary Hawkins – who with his son Sterling Hawkins founded and runs The Center for Advancing Retail & Technology (CART) – talks with Sterling and co-host Kevin Coupe about how to implement the building blocks necessary to achieve Retail 4.0 relevance – connected to consumers, contextual to their behavior, and reflecting imbedded cultural values of organizations and their leadership. The inevitable reality is that retailing is being dramatically remade. What remains to be seen is how many businesses will adapt and thrive. 

It was a decade ago that Gary Hawkins, who with his son (and podcast co-host) Sterling Hawkins founded and runs the Center for Advancing Retail & Technology (CART), released a paper about Retail 3.0, describing how the industry had evolved to the point where marketing personalization, contextual relevancy and customer data-fueled brand-retailer collaboration had become critical to survival.

Now, with a new paper, Retail 4.0, Hawkins argues that the digital transformation of retail will be breathtaking in its scale, scope, and speed. This digitalization of retail – the industry transmuting into a new, higher-order, ecosystem – will be accompanied by a radically different economic model, disrupting the entire industry.  

In this, the first of a two-part conversation, Gary, Sterling, and Kevin Coupe talk about the cultural transformations that must take place within businesses if they are to have any chance of transforming their companies, setting the stage for the next step, which is implementation.

It was management guru Peter Drucker who once said, "Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change, and the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn". Today's RT podcast guest is Terry Hawkins (no relation to co-host Sterling Hawkins), who for more than three decades has challenged organizations to be better at learning and teaching the people on their front lines by designing, creating, and implementing results-producing education systems. This is particularly timely since we are living in a time when the pandemic has disrupted so many businesses that it seems impossible to make internal training and education a high priority.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. 

It may be a cliche, but it also never has been more true, especially because the competitive environment never has been more cutthroat. At the same time, technology and the pandemic have combined to create seismic shifts in consumer behavior.

What does this mean? Retailers have to compete not just for every last customers, but every first customer.

In this Retail Tomorrow episode, Sterling and Kevin use a close-to-home case study to examine what retailers are and not doing to attract new customers. (And at about 12 minutes in, Sterling comes up with a big idea that every retailer ought to adopt ASAP.)

What separates the winners and losers in the current pandemic-centric retail environment? Why are some retailers able to establish themselves as sustainably essential, while others are just momentarily relevant because people had to buy toilet paper somewhere?

On today's podcast, Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe re-engage with Steve Dennis, president and founder of Sageberry Consulting and the author of  Remarkable Retail: How to Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Digital Disruption, to continue their conversation about predictions and prescriptions for a post-pandemic future.

This week, in the first of a two-parter, Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe engage in a conversation with Steve Dennis, the author of “Remarkable Retail: How to Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Digital Disruption”.  Published just as the pandemic hit, “Remarkable Retail” focuses on trends and behaviors – both in business and among consumers – that were accelerated by the coronavirus. The discussion focuses on the “eight essentials” of a remarkable retail experience – factors that cut across format and concept, building relevance and helping retailers avoid a descent into becoming "museums of disappointment".

Sterling Hawkins and Kevin Coupe take a look back at last week's Congressional testimony by for technology CEOs – Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Apple's Tim Cook, and Google's Sundar Pichai – at a hearing that shed more heat than light. They use comments by the four executives to launch a broader discussion about competition, differential advantages, and the importance for retailers to "find their inner barbecue." (Trust us. The metaphor works.)