Week 92 – QotW – Retail

This is the Question of the Week episode for this week, and the News Roundup episode should be up on Friday. This week's question is about whether the death of physical retail has been exaggerated, and ultimately what the state of physical retail is in a world where Amazon and e-commerce in general seems to be wreaking havoc. We talk through recent trends in retail, from the supposed apocalypse to those companies investing despite the downturn including Apple and T-Mobile. Aaron uses the jobs-to-be-done framework to talk through what people hire retail to do for them, and how physical retail might be able to hold its own against online retail. And we talk about the experimental nature of much of what's being done in physical retail to stem the tide of e-commerce. Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode: Article on Amazon's book stores: http://www.retaildive.com/news/why-amazon-is-betting-big-on-brick-and-mortar/431499/ Introduction to jobs-to-be-done theory: https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done T-Mobile store expansion: http://fortune.com/2016/04/26/t-mobile-store-openings-iphone/ New York Times piece on Amazon retail technology: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/technology/amazon-wants-to-crush-your-store-with-its-technology-might.html?_r=1 Quartz piece on retail innovations: https://qz.com/956745/retail-experiments-from-farfetch-nike-and-amazon-offer-visions-of-the-store-of-the-future/ Blog post on JTBD framework applied to retail: https://bhc3.com/2012/01/11/carving-up-the-retail-industry-by-customer-jobs-to-be-done/. As ever, we welcome your feedback via Twitter (@jandawson / @aaronmiller), the website (podcast.beyonddevic.es), or email ([email protected]).