The current lockdown raises the question of how local retailers can survive in the future.
One possible answer to this is:
- Digitise and communicate "digilog: consciously and purposefully connect the digital world with the analogue world! Build communities.
- Define your Uniqueness: only companies that are not interchangeable will have opportunities in the future.
- Continue to define uniqueness and continue to define your Clear and original advantages against existing online giants such as Amazon, Zalando or others and develop strategies from them! As a local dealer, you come up trumps with personal advice and customer proximity. You can also profitably use these advantages online!
- Take advantage of the fact that shopping has a recreational and leisure value for people and create appropriate opportunities!
- Join forces with other traders and take advantage of Agglomeration effects! Another advantage of this is that the costs are spread over several.
- Use all available sales channels (multichannel)!
Parcel tax and closure of online mail order houses?
A clear NO to this!
Current demands from various sides, such as
- levy a parcel tax for online purchases or
- the demand that online traders should also close in lockdown
are not the right signals. Why should distribution channels be played off against each other with a parcel tax? In addition, we would thereby Bureaucracy in Germany even more. And it is this bureaucracy that creates so many pitfalls for us entrepreneurs. And why should companies that have worked sustainably in the past and that hire people even in these times be punished? These demands do not make sense. But if they do, it shows that they are not yet ready to rethink. These nonsensical demands continue to show clearly that nothing has been learned from the crisis. They still hope that we will get back the old normality. In all likelihood we will not!
Leadership in retail
The trade now needs feasible or pragmatic visions for the futurehow things can continue. From these visions, new motivations will emerge. And from this, in turn, there will be new ideas for the continued existence of local trade. One vision of this is digiloge communication.
About 1.5 years ago, I was at a congress of the DIY sector. One speaker said that digitalisation was already very advanced among them. They had offered a dyed plant on the internet that was only available in this market. I think that in this context digitalisation was misunderstood or not understood at all. It is not about offering people an artificial product that they do not need.
It is about showing ways to combine the digital world and the analogue world in a meaningful way. It is about learning how to combine the digital world and the analogue world in a meaningful way, so that the company remains on the market in the long term and jobs are secured. It is also about learning a digiloge mentality or a digital understanding that is not scary but that shows opportunities.
Digitisation does not begin and end with the use of a smartphone.
