As all real retailers eventually meet in life, it was clear that Hernán and I would meet sooner or later. It was in the spring of 2019 (although it seems like much longer, to be honest), just when his RobinBrick project was starting to grow.
Entrepreneur and bike lover (he came pedaling from Munich when he moved back to Barcelona a few years ago), Hernán is a profile committed to the industry and to the community and his purpose is to make brick and mortar retail “better, sexier, greater”.
1.What is RobinBrick?
We are a platform whose goal is to evolve physical retail to its best version. We call ourselves RobinBrick because we define ourselves as “the Robin Hood of brick and mortar”. The people who work in the stores are the greatest source of knowledge and data generation, but generally all this information is not optimized. On the other hand, offline commerce in general does not work as well with data as online. RobinBrick as a tool feeds on the information provided by the store’s team and systems and returns it converted into value propositions and easy-to-use dashboards that empower retailers to move to the next level. The platform also includes essential services in the covid era such as videocommerce, appointment booking service or payment gateway.
2.To what extent is it possible to “humanize” data?
The main unresolved issue in physical retail today is to really listen to people. There are three business scenarios: the first is a product-centric approach where stores receive product and instructions and there is not much further contact. The second is a somewhat more inclusive approach: someone visits the stores, listens to the feedback from the teams, retains the best-argued one (regardless of whether the idea is good or bad) and forgets the others (if an idea is good but the person is not skilled at arguing, no one will remember – unfortunately – this idea). In the third (and less common) approach, feedback from the store team is intensely sought: calls, mails, questionnaires, reports, visits, … This format, however, is only sustainable if you have one or very few stores, because after a while the load of information becomes unmanageable. It is therefore essential to find quick and fun mechanisms so that the store team can send you information with a certain numerical basis that you can convert into data that will help you to forecast impacts or to size actions. To humanize the data, it is enough to recognize that data origin will always be human and that it will be used by people to impact the business.
3.Why is it essential to reinvent retail based on people? What role do KPIs play in all this?
As I said, people are great sources of information and data generators in the retail world. Analyzing your team rotas and seeing who you put in each time slot and at the head of each section and measuring what impact it has on sales, or gathering information from the teams to streamline a purchase forecast or decide on a product mix are two clear examples. However, it is important to keep in mind that when we talk about generating data, it is not about doing big surveys on “like/dislike”, because we would get a lot of information, but little relevant. It is much more interesting to generate unbiased data through mechanisms that allow us to give answers just sliding our thumb on the screen. From there, we can segment according to the variables we are interested in knowing and generate clusters of information that allow us to narrow down what is relevant and will have an impact on the results. They say that “retail is detail” and this also applies to the way we manage data and information.
4.Another key to the evolution of retail is the integration of the on and off strategy … How is it possible to carry it out without dying in the attempt?
Curiously, what has caused the most sensation in networks and articles about omnichannel, which are gadgets, are the least relevant in a process of on/off integration. Smart fitting rooms are not used by anyone, just like interactive mirrors and other such gadgets, which are expensive and whose use has no clear return or impact on sales. Going omnichannel is, above all, about integrating online and offline stocks, because if there is a duplicity of stocks and data, we will never manage to treat our business as a single one. So the first step is stocks and data, not digital signage. Another big challenge in embracing the phygital concept is to avoid cannibalization between channels and to know how to allocate where sales come from. There is a very direct relationship between the conversion rate and the channel chosen. For example, in a physical store a 17% conversion rate can be considered adequate, while online conversion is usually between 1% and 3% … Only a powerful online player will achieve a conversion rate of 5%, which can reach 10% in very specific moments such as Black Friday. Customer loyalty in offline is much higher than online, where the approach is much more transactional. In offline, the customer is more loyal to the person than to the brand. Online, you value price and delivery time. As we can see, these are two environments with different variables. To all this we must add videocommerce, which is emerging as a major trend (it has risen by 1,400% worldwide as a result of the pandemic) and deserves to be treated as a new per se. Be that as it may, we get to talk about omnichannel when we make the human being the point of connection. Physical space, digital space and video act to drive sales teams out of the offline store and maximize their exposure to make the most of their talent.
5.Why is a micro-action so much more relevant today than a macro-action?
In reality, everyone knows how to do a macro action, which is the paradoxically most obvious action: if this store goes bad, we close it. If this line goes bad, we discontinue it. This is very typical of offline retail. In ecommerce, however, everything is a micro-optimization, which is what really makes the difference: deciding to change the color of an action button, adding a shadow, modifying a position on the screen … And measuring this micro-impact on the sale. No one can imagine the online world without constant testing, it is totally assumed and it is not a debate for anyone. With the physical store, the opposite is true: it is totally static. You plan the season, you launch it and cross your fingers that it works. To me it’s very much like old-fashioned TVs: you put on a channel and sit down and only get up to change it when the program is over or to turn off the TV. Micro-actions in the physical store help us to be more dynamic, and to do this it is essential to remove certain barriers. The first is organizations that are too hierarchical or centralized, since one person cannot organize everything. Even if we have area managers, store visits are not frequent enough to test micro-actions and measure them (one visit per month does not allow us enough time to work with this type of dynamic). The second barrier is related to reactions. In the online world, I can program my algorithm to propose a whole series of chained products for a given sale. In the physical store, this is not something that can be automated and is more complex. That is why it is interesting that each micro-action that we are going to propose (either by the area manager or the store team itself) has an alert system that facilitates monitoring. For example, if we decide to change a window display or a price and we have the tool that helps us to checklist the process and measure the impact, a successful micro-action can become a global campaign.
Thank you very much for sharing the RobinBrick universe with us, Hernán!
