Top Ten Retail Trends for 2022

Top Trends in Retail Digital Transformation and Innovation for 2022

Increasing Volatility

Over the past two years, due to the global Covid-19 pandemic and, more recently, the economic tensions associated with the invasion of Ukraine, retail has faced a highly volatile environment, both in its supply chain and inventory management and in the emergence of new customer expectations.

While some relevant business and technology investments were made before and during the pandemic by the best players in modern retail, and are only just being integrated, customer experience and business agility have since become the key competitive differentiators.

Retailers must refocus on margin and operational performance indicators, but also on concrete actions to be implemented to meet the growing expectations of consumers regarding environmental, social and corporate responsibility (ESG).

Operations Agility

As a result, retailers must continue their digital transformation strategies to deliver a unified retail experience. These changes can guarantee that they remain agile enough to adapt to ever-changing market conditions, while increasing both productivity and visibility. Consequently, areas previously considered “untouchable” must now be thoroughly reinvestigated, like merchandising or empowering frontline-store employees.

These are some of the conclusions in the recent Gartner report, “Top Trends in Retail Digital Transformation and Innovation for 2022”¹. In addition, Gartner explains that “traditionally, most multichannel retailers have separate systems – such as inventory management, customer data, ERP, order management, e-commerce and point of sale – developed for each channel with duplicated cost centers”. The report also notes that “because these systems are usually not well integrated with each other, they act as data silos gathering redundant or limited data, with the retailers’ core systems unable to communicate with each other”.

“Only 4% of retail respondents view themselves as having a highly composable business, lagging far behind other industries.”

2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey

Composable Solutions

Gartner states that “a composable approach can enable retailers to construct a business-led open technology platform for collaborating and constructing an agile response that makes them more resilient for competitive advantage”, and adds that “edge computing enables near-real-time observations that can augment currently centralized processes by learning about customer actions and inventory status at the location level”.

Released in March 2022, the report’s focus on the top 10 trends for retail covers in-store execution and merchandising planning for unified commerce, digital business transformation, and emerging technologies and innovations.

“73% of retail respondents expect to increase store technology investments in 2022.”

2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey

Leaders’ Digest

We believe retail CEOs and CIOs, chief enterprise architects, chief marketing officers, directors of merchandising, program managers and their teams will find insightful content to drive future success by:

Assessing how to design a composable centralized execution platform that easily connects all systems, channels and customer touchpoints.
Aligning all product-procurement stakeholders to identify changes and risks involved in moving toward customer-behavior hierarchy models.
Assessing, testing and integrating intelligence at the store “edge”.
Constructing a repeatable process to capitalize on successful collaboration with new or existing ecosystem partners.

¹Gartner, “Top Trends in Retail Digital Transformation and Innovation for 2022”, By Jonathan Kutner, Miriam Burt, Kelsie Marian, Max Hammond, Robert Hetu, Sandeep Unni, Hanna Karki, 14 March 2022.

Gartner Disclaimer:

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request Kerlink.