Next is facing a ‘Kodak moment’ according to analysts at Berenberg, suffering from the effects of a ‘wait and see’ attitude towards the e-commerce shift which they were early to identify but slow to adopt.
The strategy to pursue short-term returns has left the retailer burdened with an outdated business model. Ongoing structural change in the industry means that retailers are set for significant gains from machine based learning which can help to predict future value from certain customer behaviours.
Pini Yakuel, founder and CEO of Optimove, comments: “Analyst predictions, technology innovations, competitor decisions – all of these form the landscape in which retailers have to create their strategy. Unfortunately, in the absence of a crystal ball, many decisions end up being based on current rather than future profitability. What we’ve seen is that application of new developments in machine learning can give predictions of future value based on individual customer behaviours.
“For an industry which is still going through the challenge of some major structural changes, each of which comes with its own financial constraints, the power of machine learning to predict the returns on each type of customer interaction – whether that is a customer who only shops online, buys on their mobile whilst on the go, or who prefers to browse in store and buy online – is key to making savvy decisions.”