Think Retail

Digital transformation was something retail organizations and financial institutions were already talking about before COVID hit. The pandemic has accelerated the trend and brought with it more challenges that were not anticipated. While brands have adopted many makeshift processes and systems to address these needs, companies are now wondering what’s going to stick after the pandemic. Today, our guests are going to provide some context to help answer that question. 

Stuart Armstrong is Chief Revenue Officer at JohnRyan and is a leading figure in customer engagement and digital signage technologies with a focus on how these technologies underpin business building applications within retail and retail banking industries. Jean-Pierre Lacroix is President and Lead Strategist at SLD, and together Stuart and Jean conducted a joint study with over 500 respondents in the retail and finance categories to find out what companies are dealing with now to gain insights and provide advice on how to move forward. 

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As disruption from the pandemic rises and falls in waves around the globe, retail brands are pivoting their business to try and make up for related sales losses. Many brands were in good shape to manage this with robust digital and omnichannel ecosystems already in place. Many luxury brands, however, were not as well prepared. Heavily reliant on an in-store, really personal customer experience model, luxury brands in North America are now scrambling. A drastically changed in-store experience, the loss of tourists from Asia, and inexperience in the digital realm are some of the key challenges they’re facing.

Fortunately, Casey Golden, founder and CEO of retail experience platform Luxlock believes that luxury brands have everything they need to get through this crisis and come out on the other side by leading digital transformation and setting a higher standard for shopping online. 

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brainstorming is a practice that most businesses need to employ from time to time, but it’s not as simple as just getting a bunch of people together with a whiteboard and some sticky notes. It’s a real skill. It requires a lot of preparation, guidance, structure and a plan. You need to be able to help the team focus but also be creative. Brainstorming sessions can be invigorating and exciting, if not challenging. And with work from home being an ongoing reality, brainstorm sessions might seem impossible to manage. 

In this episode we speak with SLD’s brand strategist Ada Zhang about some foundational brainstorming tips and how to make the magic happen, even remotely. 

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For sports teams, the brand is everything, it’s massive. Fan behavior in which individuals feel their own self-identity is intertwined with a team, even to the extent that the team’s performance is felt on a deeply personal level, has been widely studied by psychologists and academics and has driven sales of billions of dollars of merchandise around the world. But relying on diehard fans for sales is limiting. 

Today, we’re talking to professional sports team brand expert, Anthony Partipilo, the Chief Brand Officer for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, about why sports teams need to reach beyond their inner circle of fandom to new kind of fan and how the Roughriders are doing just that. 

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The perks of operating your own independent business are often outweighed by the enormous burdens that come along with it. You become a de facto marketer, administrator, HR specialist. You work incredibly long hours and no matter what category you’re in, you’re facing increasing competition, both for clients and talent from larger organizations. For the Canadian Orthodontic Partners, the burden on independent orthodontic practices presented an opportunity. Founded by orthodontists, the organization has brought an initial 51 independent orthodontic practices under one banner in a new national brand. 

Today, we’re talking to Paul Abrams, Vice President of Marketing and Growth for the Canadian Orthodontic Partners and their new consumer-facing brand docbraces. Paul, thank you for being with us today.

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Design Thinking is a term that many of us have heard, but what exactly does it mean, and how can financial brands benefit from this approach?

Today we’re speaking with Janet Jones, a design thinker with an incredible range of experience in design, strategy, and innovation about design thinking for financial brands. Janet’s experience includes 25 years of interior design, as well as working as a strategic foresight consultant and an instructor in foresight and design, at OCAD. This experience led to working directly with financial brands as an innovator and the first design strategist with Scotiabank’s Digital Factory, to help implement a design-driven culture in the bank’s digital transformation.

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In the financial industry, security is paramount. As the world moves online and technology becomes more sophisticated, so do hackers and scams. The advantages of leveraging technology have just skyrocketed with the impact of COVID-19, but preventing systems breaches can make the difference between customer loyalty and customer attrition. In China, biometric security is rapidly being adopted as a safe and easy way to handle financial transactions securely. Will COVID-19 be the thing that pushes North American banks to begin implementing these security measures on a wide scale?

In this episode, we speak with Nick Hallas, Vice President of Sales at Daon – an innovator in developing and deploying biometric authentication and identity assurance solutions worldwide – about the why and the how of biometric security.

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