The 4th “Retail Summit – Port of Thoughts. Legends & Rebels. Mastering the Art of Digital Breakthrough” took place in Hamburg on September 29, 2016. Speakers – well-known entrepreneurs, academics and trend researchers – and more than 350 representatives of the retail industry discussed the opportunities and challenges of digitization.

The future does not wait. And the digital future definitely doesn’t. Commerce also has to deal with the issue of digitisation – not with esoteric visions, but with concrete solutions that work in practice.

For this reason, this year’s RETAIL SUMMIT – PORT OF THOUGHTS will focus on the following question: Which solid feasible answers will commerce find to respond to the digital challenges?

“Has retail forgotten the art of trading?” – The ballroom of the Empire Riverside Hotel falls silent on this November morning at the “Port Of Thoughts” event in Hamburg. This was the question addressed by Prof. Björn Bloching PhD, a partner at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, in his opening speech. Statistics impressively show a customer drift into e-shopping – sometimes more, sometimes less, varying according to the industry. In any case, it’s a figure of 15.8% in consumer electronics. The statistics also state that around 70% of customers are unsatisfied with brick-and-mortar business. The reasons: inadequate consulting, lacking expertise, waiting times.

Almost every company has a data warehouse and thus reserves of interesting and useful customer data. But only a very few companies are able to put this data to use for profile and in their day-to-day business. This includes primarily the right approaches as well as the right tools for implementation. Answers and inspiration to the question of how to handle Big Data were given at the Retail Summit 2013 in Hamburg.