Putting it in perspective

Three days, 90 speakers and over 800 attendees later, the 2009 World Retail Congress has drawn to a close. In trying to put it all into perspective, its interesting to look back over the substance of the sessions, read the many press cuttings and to recall the countless conversations we all had. How best to summarise the mood?

From some of the press coverage, you would get the impression that the mood was downbeat with  retailers still gloomy about prospects. My impression was a little different. I would say that many of the retailers were not so much “gloomy” as “realistic”. Many were taken aback by the positive forecasts by the 2 major economists who presented to the Congress - Ajay Kapur and Dr Ira Kalish. Whilst they clearly wanted to believe that the worst was behind us, they prefered to remain at best cautiously optimistic about when this would filter through to the retail sector. To this end, a number of retailers were giving media comments to downplay the optimism knowing that it will take a little longer for any green shoots or “a sunbeam in cold water” as Etam’s Richard Simonin described it, to emerge.

But when taking into account the other things retailers were talking about implementing or pursuing, it didn’t make it feel pessimistic. Taken overall, there was a real sense that retailers understood that the industry was facing a period of unprecedented change, exacerbated but not necessarily caused by the recession. The statistics about the multiplication of internet shopping, the rise of Google, the growing importance of customisation for consumers, the imperative of international growth - all of these trends and more reinforced that point that retailers can’t just batten down the hatches and wait for recovery. Retailers were talking about how they were going to address these issues, and in some cases, already implementing strategies to meet these changes.

This message was summed up well by William Fung, managing director of Li & Fung in his keynote address in the opening plenary session when he urged delegates not to lose sight of their priorities. He said that the Chinese character for the word “crisis” breaks down into 2 words: “challenge” and “opportunity”. And that seemed to put the retail mood in a far better perspective than anything else.