How Will Green Affect Your Gold?

There is no doubt that green issues will increasingly impact all our lives. As the importance of the physical context in which we live and the impact of environmental connection begins to affect shoppers, profound and lasting behavioural changes will take shape. These changes will affect retail in both a deep and lasting way.

They will recalibrate every point of the Retail C.O.M.P.A.S.$.® – cultural behaviours; organisational model; merchandise strategy & planning; promotion; access; selling environment; and $dollars.

As political, economic, media, physical and social pressures mount on both retailers and shoppers, the behavioural change buttons of reward and punishment will cause far-reaching changes.

Both retail businesses and shoppers will become more efficient. Consumption patterns will change. Value and quality will once again become more important than just cheap price and consumption gluttony. Waste will become abhorrent. Anyone who does not exhibit an empathetic face and tangible proof of positive action to improve their impact on the environment risks becoming marginalised as the world is swept up into a genuine desire to create a better place to live.

While the amount of propaganda and the confusion competing messages create will build to a crescendo, the average shopper will ignore the extremities in favour of a deep and growing belief that we need to clean up our act in the face of growing physical proof. The more severe the variances in weather and natural disasters, the deeper the motivation to act will become.

Shoppers will vote with their feet and their purses.

But this is good news for retailers. Unlike unforeseen trends, this is obvious and clear in its direction. Best practice retailers all over the world are already actively planning how they alter the settings at every point of their Retail C.O.M.P.A.S.$.® to ensure they align their businesses to this trend and underwrite their future prosperity.

There is always profit in change.

Now is the time for retailers to be re-examining their business to develop change strategies for themselves that ensure success in one of the broadest and most far reaching mass behavioural change periods in history outside a world war. Without a doubt there is a great deal of the media propaganda that is nothing short of bullshit. But don’t let that blind you from what is really happening.

The issue is not in the detail of each claim and counter claim but the overarching changes that are occurring across the social and environmental spectrum that will inevitably affect your business. Look carefully at how you operate and the perception your customers have of you. Planning now will create a prosperous future.