Technology takes over

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There are three of us in my marriage, so it’s a bit crowded.

Don’t worry reader you have not picked up Polygamy Weekly or the Princess Diana Chronicles.

Currently in my marriage there is my wife and I and the late Steve Jobs – all in a three-way relationship, or actually his iPad is.

Ever since we got an iPad, I come home to, go to sleep to, and wake up to a constant tap, tap, tap of fingers against the glass. It is seemingly more addictive than crack cocaine.

Every time I look at my wife now she is bathed in an ethereal glow from the screen of her iPad. Forget the pill, forget the rabbit, the iPad has freed women from shackles that neither of those inventions ever could; and it has empowered and unleashed the technically inept of both sexes.

Before we got the iPad my wife could not send an email. Now it would not surprise me to learn she was to appear as the next Bond villain in Skyfall, threatening to blow up the world via her iPad.

But what’s that got to do with retail? We recently hosted an event entitled ‘Differentiate or Die’ and during the course of it some really salient points were made, including the need to adapt to a seemingly promiscuous customer.

That customer is represented by my wife, newly technologically enabled who is now going on Safari (geddit?) to explore not the Serengeti but the online world that has opened up to her.

My wife is online when you least expect it and is operating in a random and illogical fashion. Instead of spending hours window-shopping, as she did previously, she now spends her hours online window shopping.

She is evolutionary by nature and very fast, and she is also value-driven, ordering from whoever sells and delivers it the cheapest. She is the future of shopping, and indeed very scary.

If Tesco, which has more data on individuals than all the UK security services combined, is struggling to engage with my wife and other customers, what chance does the average retailer on the high street have?