World Retail Congress in Berlin, part 1

Consumer confidence is low all over the world and it will no improve until the situation on the job market gets better – participants and more than 100 presenters agreed at the World Retail Congress, held in Hotel Intercontinental, Berlin.

From the organisers, EMAP it was congress director Ian McGarrigle who opened the event by speaking about main trends revealed by their global survey. In the audience there were more than 1,000 top managers from 70 countries. The director stated that the best opportunity for retail’s development was in online sales, multi-channel communication with consumers and international expansion. Two sections were dedicated to online sales. Peter Gold, the director of CB Richard Ellis introduced the results of a 10-countery survey that included Hungary as well. He told that more western Europeans used the Internet for shopping than eastern Europeans, e.g. in Belgium 50 percent of Internet users look for product information online and 41 percent buys something, while the same proportions in Hungary are 48 and 17 percent. As regards product groups, in the UK food has a 10-percent share in total online sales, followed by France with 6 percent and Germany and Italy with 4 percent each; Hungary, Poland and Russia are at 1 percent. Men buy things online twice as often as women and consumers with a higher income like online shopping better than those who earn less. What about online shoppers’ age distribution? Simon Forster, e-commerce director of Debenham informed that there is no difference between age groups. The division is the same as in stores, so there is no need to target different age groups with individual sales strategies. Another section of the congress was dedicated to multi-channel communication with consumers. Ian Cheshire, president-CEO of Kingfisher told that customers who enter their shop bring more data and better technology with them than the ones the store has. No wonder that their competitor, Lowe’s purchased 42,000 iPhones for their shop assistants. Matt Brittin, Google’s director in the UK and Ireland spoke about a digital revolution, calling attention to the fact that detailed data from Google searches reveal a lot about consumers’ interests and possible future trends. He added that in Europe 15-20 percent of Google searches was done vie mobile phones and most of the company’s applications are now developed for mobiles and are only adapted to computers later. (To be continued)