We start section three now on customer experience, which I hope you get the feeling. It's pretty important now, especially in this new post COVID world of retail and customer experience is something you can really differentiate yourself on. There's going to be four components to this. We'll talk first about the integration of online/offline strategies in terms of customer experience. I'll look at some examples with digitally native vertical brands. These are brands that started online and started opening offline stores. Then we'll do the reverse. We'll look at legacy brands and retailers that started offline and are now upping their game in the digital world. Finally, we'll look at China to get some examples from what they're doing in new retail and social commerce. Let's start with integration of online and offline strategies and how all of this is being accelerated or was accelerated by COVID. We're going to see these as enduring trends going forward. If we first look at the mall, one of the big repercussions, even before COVID was the death of some department stores. We were seeing a lot of department stores closed even before COVID started. Of course, COVID accelerated that. Department stores are really important in thinking about what happens to malls because department stores are the anchor stores. When those go dark, it affects not only themselves, but it affects the other stores within the mall. When malls start to reopen and respond to the COVID world, we'll see some of them not reopen at all because some of these malls did start to go bankrupt or may have gone out of business, particularly what are known as the B and C malls. The malls that do open up, I think we'll start to see them configured. One of the things that we talked about in the last section was about how buy online pick up in the store has become a really important trend that was responding to COVID because people were afraid to go out of their house. It's become so successful that this is a trend that we expect to see continuing for a long time. Now, buy online pick up in the store suggests a different use of physical space. One of the things you're seeing in standalone stores or in stores like Walmart is that they have a certain amount of the floor space for shopping and then they have back office space for a distribution center or fulfillment. That makes sense so that now you can have from the store itself become a distribution center for the residents or the shoppers that live close to the store. Well, the same kinds of things are starting to happen in malls also. They are responding to the fact that people are doing a lot of shopping online before they come into the store or they're doing shopping online and they want to pick up in the store. That means that we'll start seeing, for example, more of the real estate in a mall devoted to loading docks or to supply chain and logistics consideration rather than into front office, so to speak, retail space. The physical retail space in a mall will start to be configured to really optimize what is needed for omni-channel shopping. We also may see different uses of parking lots. If people are coming by just to pick up, we don't need parking spaces and you can maybe use the parking in a different way for maybe pop-up stores or other kinds of things that will attract shoppers back to the mall. The first thing we're seeing post COVID and going forward is a reuse of the physical mall space to recognize the change in shopping to not just physical shopping, but more like omni-shopping and to recognize these different trends. We also saw during COVID and this will continue, growth of businesses like Shopify. Shopify is a platform that offers to merchants the ability to quickly get online and have this online website or online platform. With Shopify, in some sense, is competing directly with Amazon, which also offers a platform for merchants to sell and to get up to speed very quickly in e-commerce and digital marketing. The difference between Shopify and Amazon is Amazon, as I mentioned earlier, is very customer focused. Their home model is to create the best customer experience where Shopify thinks of the merchant as their customer. What they try to do is to maximize the merchants' needs so that the merchants can themselves become an omni-channel shopper. Shopify saw a great growth during COVID. They really went up very quickly as more and more merchants started to join on their platform. Shopify is also moving into fulfillment services, etc. Shopify is one of the big winners of COVID. Another big winner in COVID was Instacart. Instacart is a delivery service, particularly for grocery. They hire shoppers that go into the grocery stores and pick up goods and then deliver these goods to shoppers who don't want to go into the store or who may go into the store but want somebody else to deliver the products to their door. Instacart saw a mammoth growth during COVID. I think they started out with something like 200,000 shoppers going into COVID and quickly ramped up to 750,000 shoppers. Really big growth, being in the right place at the right time and pivoting to understand the changes in shopping behavior that happened during COVID. The other thing that we're seeing that's different now is the importance of experiential retailing. As I've said, a lot of these trends happened before COVID, this is another one, experiential retailing had definitely been a growing trend, but the pandemic supercharges it. The reason is any shopping that you can buy that's easier done online people will do online. The repurchasing are things you don't give much thought to, instead of bothering to go into the physical store to buy, you're just going to buy it with the convenience of online. What will drive you into the physical store? A reason to enjoy a customer experience or the touch and feel of the product as we mentioned before, the immediacy of picking up a product right away. This is the idea of creating customer experiences that you want to do in person, either for the physicality of it or the social aspect of it and we will see a big growth in experiential retailing as retailing grows over time. As I mentioned in the earlier section, that we are seeing these enduring changes to retail post COVID, just to reemphasize because there are very important takeaways is this one, this move to three channels; a customer centered omni-channel retailing, that means seamless integration between online and offline perceived through the customer focus. That's customer centered omni-channel retailing. We're also seeing the importance of this relationship between the retailer and the shopper, in-store experience that inspires trust and that creates a long term relationship with the customer, and that's really what we're looking for in modern retailing and modern marketing. What I want to focus on is in thinking about how customer engagement and experience delivers to these two goals. The big takeaway that I want to say in this section is that both traditional or legacy retailers and digital companies are converging to be everywhere customers want them to be 24/7, whether it's online or offline. They're trying to deliver a really strong customer engagement and experience that inspires long term loyalty. If we go back to the metrics in order to plot this, when we look at this trend for direct consumer, as I mentioned, one of the big trends that happened before COVID and was accelerated by COVID, is that brands were going direct to the end user or direct to consumer, because they want to get the customer data, they want to manage the customer experience, they want to control their brand, and it also gives them in many cases the better price and cost position. These direct to consumer brands because they are so in touch with the consumer on the success metrics are above bar or have a leadership strategy in the brand category. These are brands customers really like. They're very strong brands, very strong performance and product superiority. Because they go direct and they can get rid of these intermediary channels or these intermediaries, they can offer a better cost position and therefore they can offer a better price. They are strong in brand and low price. Those are their two quadrant leadership strategy. Now, they have to be good enough and maybe even better in customer experience and this is where there's a difference between digitally native vertical brands and legacy brands. Digitally native vertical brands. Digitally native means they start online, that's like a Warby or a Casper Bonobos. They are ahead of the curve in customer convenience because they've created this brand online. They've watched customer journey all along. As I mentioned, they were looking at the user experience as I showed you in the data previously. They can map on that data and they can deliver really comprehensive customer understanding, which removes all the pain points and offers total convenience. These digitally native vertical brands are also ahead of the curve in a leadership strategy in the frictionless quadrant. But they only slowly started opening stores. They don't have the physical experience and they're below the bar in terms of the physical positive experiential or customer experience, because they don't have many stores and they're starting to ramp up and open more stores. Legacy brands, on the other hand, particularly, again, we're focusing on direct to consumer here, like a Lululemon brand or a Nike brand or even a Trader Joe's, they have had stores for a long time. They know their customer very well. They are ahead of the curve in a leadership position in the experiential quadrant. But many of them were slow to get digital, so they're playing catch up in the frictionless or digital quadrant. Now, in the next sections, I'm going to go into more detail on the different strategies between a digitally native vertical brand and a legacy brand.
