The Retail Conference 2014 is taking place on Wednesday 17th September 2014 at America Square Conference Centre in London.
This is the 8th time conference takes place and as a well-established event, it became a key platform to share industry knowledge and discuss retail`s hottest topics. This year’s retail conference will attract between 150 and 200 delegates making it a fantastic opportunity to network with some of the leading minds in this sector.
A great example of the passion and professionalism found at this event is the founder and managing director of The Retail Conference, Clare Rauner. Known in the industry as The Retail Champion she is an expert in current and future trends and routes to success as well an exceptionally good visionary individual with a real feel for the market.
Clare wrote the books ‘The Retail Champion: 10 Steps to Retail Success’ and ‘How to Sell to Retail: The Secrets to Getting Your Product to Market’ both of these are an absolute must-read.
Personally, I am very passionate about the world of retail and caught the retail bug whilst working in the industry with clients like Tesco and M&S. Working with these clients my company helps them to put their products on shelf all over the world by providing a language translation service specifically tailored to the retail sector.
The event will also be an opportunity to share opinions on matters that are important to retailers, subjects like what makes brands successful, how to conduct efficient market analysis and how to achieve effective true multichannel communication.
K International`s involvement in all this is to create emotional engagement with consumers regardless of the language(s) used. Two-way communication between your brand and your consumers is a key builder of trust and therefore a vital element of your international retail strategy.
Some Presentations of Note
During the event, I particularly look forward to seeing Jeremy Michael, Managing Director, Service Management Group. Service Management Group (SMG) is a research agency conducting store-level, ongoing customer experience measurement. The presentation will be a joined one with Bruce Gibson, Head of Retail, Hobbycraft. The title “Crafting the Future: How Hobbycraft has driven commercial success through listening to its customers” suggest that both listening to consumers and responding accordingly will be one of the key indicators that consumers mention when highlighting great shopping experiences. I wonder whether SMG had conducted studies on how translation and product adaptation to new regions influenced figures?
I am also very keen to see Karl Reindl, Managing Director, Youstice presenting “How to Build Consumer Trust in an Online World”. Technology is a key influencer in all industries, our clients talk about the ‘clicks and mortar’ business model (which we develop multilingual solutions for) and our own workflow technology is constantly being updated to handle the latest trends
Another interesting point of Karl`s presentation will no doubt be a discussion on the most effective communication channels for delivering customer care. I suspect that it will mention that how we communicate is crucial. To inform the customer about a product is not enough, we need to create a message that will be truly meaningful as this will be the catalyst to buy. If we think about it, with today`s content-packed Online World the message needs to stand out to engage consumers, often the first two lines describing product will be all that customer will read, as we have more choice and less time, consumers will ignore boring, inadequate and dull messages.
Richard Wonnacott, Retail Business Consultant, Microstrategy will present on “Standing at the nexus of big data, business analytics and mobile”. Richard will present to highlight how important it is to efficiently manage information within the business. I look forward to seeing a presentation on how managing information can contribute to the success of a company as it is something that we have engaged in here, managing linguistic assets of our clients across countries and continents. Once your business goes global, you will face linguistic challenges both internally and externally. The staff will require training, the legal team will engage with local authorities, reports from local suppliers will be sent in different languages. Managing this asset centrally will guarantee consistency of terminology across communication channels.
I Hope to See You There
Looking forward to this great experience and I hope to meet real retail enthusiasts along the way.
Be very happy to talk about your language challenges and potential retail expansion plans. We are experienced partners to some of the UK’s largest retailers and would love to help you too.
Follow me on twitter be happy to meet up.