Shop.org Roundup and The 5 Challenges

The dust has finally settled from the annual Shop.org conference in Dallas – always an inspiring (and overwhelming) experience. With over 5,000 industry insiders and hundreds of exhibitors in attendance, it’s evident that technology and consumer demand will continue to drive opportunities and as well as new challenges for the retail landscape ahead of us.

I love being part of such an incredibly exciting and dynamic time in our industry. By now, we’re pretty much living proof that digital consumers have changed the face of retail, driving dramatic changes in the way brands engage with buyers. Technology is enabling new frontiers in retail more rapidly than ever before. Some brands are quick to embrace the new landscape, while others remain skeptical of how its impact will directly affect their business and consumers. Lucky for me, I work at a company rooted in harnessing the power of technology to keep up with the pace of innovation.

Tealium has always been about solving challenges at the core. Leading the way with our foundation in tag management, and now the Customer Data Hub (CDH). Tealium’s latest evolution provides a universal approach to managing the increasing flows of customer data for today’s digital businesses. We’ve come a long way, but never lost our passion to tackle the complexity and challenges of adopting new technology and connecting data across teams, vendors, and touchpoints in real-time. In spirit of this tradition, we recently rolled out a “Challenger series”, asking real people to share their toughest match challenges, and let a Tealium digital strategist, solution consultant, or engineer solve in just two minutes or less. In brief, here are the top 5 recurring challenges I walked away with from the show:

1. Integrating online-offline: How to combine the best of both in-store and digital experiences, delivering the right content to reach customers any moment they are ready to buy (web, mobile, IoT/OTT)
2. Implementing conversational commerce: How to measure a broader picture of engagement beyond conversions, cut through the noise, and build long-term value and loyalty (social acquisition)
3. Organizational alignment: How to structure an organization to keep up with the pace of change is critical for your ability to react and respond (internal, culture, leadership)
4. International expansion: How to balance customer experience with the increasing responsibilities in data privacy and security (governance, global strategy)
5. AR/VR: How to embrace these emerging platforms to enhance product discovery and customer experience on the most personal and contextual level yet (emerging technology, transformation)

From keynote speakers to booth discussions on the show floor, there’s no question that data is at the core of retail, and should be recognized as your organization’s biggest competitive advantage. Digital is no longer a channel, but now a part of everything brands do to create a single, seamless experience for the end user. Shop.org, like many of today’s retail conferences is eye-opening in terms of all the marketing and data technologies that vie for the attention of today’s customer-centric professionals. However, it seems that all those solutions only seek to solve the symptoms of this problem. Without a universal approach to data that meets the needs of all teams, organizations will continue to struggle to keep up with customer expectations. In the end, technology doesn’t change the fact that doing business is all about creating and maintaining real-life human relationships.

We’re here to tell you that there is a better way, with a huge opportunity to capture new market share by leveraging tools that will enable you to engage on an ongoing, two-way conversation with your customers. Our mission is to cure the underlying data fragmentation issue once and for all teams. Tealium’s Customer Data Hub provides the industry’s only vendor-neutral, cross-channel, real-time hub to manage customer-centric data and actions. Watch Tealium Founder and CTO, Mike Anderson share our vision to learn more.

Ready to put Tealium to the test? Submit your own MarTech challenge today! http://tealium.com/challenge/