New Digital Divide: The Future of Digital influence in Retail

This, the 2016 version of Deloitte’s New digital divide report, deepens our exploration of the growing gap between the digital experiences that brick-and-mortar retailers are delivering and the experiences that their customers actually want.

There is almost universal recognition among retailers that digital has reshaped customer behavior and shopping forever. So then why are so many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers still so far behind at creating the digital experiences that customers really want?

Simply put, it is because these retailers have focused excessively outward—looking primarily at their ecommerce competitors—while building their digital businesses, in an attempt to anticipate customers’ needs and preferences, at the expense of paying closer attention to the cues their customers were giving them about what they really want.