Getting our heads together in a grey area

Yesterday we finally sat down and brainstormed the hell out of this enormous domain of retail, to understand it and fathom it. What was meant to be an hour long presentation and discussion session, ended up going strong for 3 hours! Only when I poked my head up from the discussion to grab a breath did I look outside the completely transparent office wall to see that it was completely dark outside!

Starting from Debashish Sahu’s presentation on how he has experienced and designed IoT solutions for retail domain to a fresh breakdown he created via secondary research. We then moved onto Aditya Aserkar’s inputs with this independent study. But we soon realised that we wouldn’t be able to get any where without proper structuring of this mammoth domain and identifying real areas of interest.

Us, all serious and trying to make sense of the domain.

We started the breakdown by structuring as per establishment type and brand type. We basically wanted to structure the different experiences a person has at different establishments. This would help us map out a customer joinery for each. Our divisions were:

Apparel/ electronics / accessories/ niche:

1. Multibrand
2. Single Brand
3. Unbranded / low end

The experiences under each of the above could be categorised into these spaces:

1. Wholesale stores
2. Warehouse / mega stores
3. Flagship stores
4. Express / essentials store

And then there was the minority (major in indian market): unbranded corner store (kirana stores)

While we were debating and finalising over this categorizations, we also stumbled upon this categorization method by Pearsons.

We realised that we were not too far off and that our 4 spaces may fit into each of these:

For the sake of eliminating overlapping experiences and creating a starting point, we decided to take up Warehouse stores and Flagship stores and individually map out customer journeys in both of these. Let’s see where we go from there. Until next post!