What I learned from ACS Conference24

Thanks so much to everyone who took part in ACS Conference24 at The Vox, NEC, Birmingham on 30 April. Reflecting in the hours following event, I’m mainly thinking about the wonderful community of people who make up this industry and who choose to engage through ACS. It’s?a real privilege to be able to offer a platform to the brilliant ideas, insights and inspiration that the people in our sector offer so generously, and the feedback so far is that this all came together really well. I can’t possibly cover all the insights that came out of the event, but here are a few that really hit me:

• Space constraints are a driver of innovation. Zabka stores in Poland are tiny, so they innovate with unmanned sites, fully automated food to go offers and day part marketing, all enabled by embracing technology to the full. Paul Stone sweats every inch of his central Manchester stores, which means he has to be ruthless in cutting space for underperforming categories.
• That links to my second observation which Mark McCammond from Henderson’s Spar summed up nicely: we’re often good at starting things in retail, not always as good at finishing them. Getting rid of dud lines and ditching failed initiatives is part of the process of innovation and ultimately growth. It was refreshing to hear retailers talking honestly about what hasn’t worked as well as what has, because good retailers don’t aim for an unblemished track record and if you never fail you’re not innovating fast enough.
• The rate of change is speeding up. You can’t be at the front of every cool trend but you can commit to embracing innovative new products and making the space for them to shine.
• Loyalty cards can be really powerful engagement tools, and the increase in deeply discounted prices for loyalty card holders is one of the key developments of the past few years in convenience retailing. But a retailer’s objective should be building a loyal customer base. These schemes may be a way of doing that, but they’re not the end in itself - Sue Nithyanandan doesn’t offer a loyalty card in her store, but she’s got customer loyalty that any retailer would give their right arm for.
• Valuing, and getting the maximum value from, every colleague is even more important than valuing space. Removing unnecessary tasks through better use of technology and investing in colleague safety matters for many reasons, but the most important is that it helps you to keep people you can’t afford to lose.
• We can work harder to find those colleagues in places we may forget to look. Care experienced people, refugees, ex-offenders, ex-forces personnel … you can’t afford to miss out on your next brilliant colleague and the core value of our sector is treating every customer and colleague with respect, so we’re a natural place for people to feel welcome regardless of their background.

Thanks very much to Sarah C Johnson , Chris Noice , Paul Rockett, Danielle Nieuwenhuys and the team for making the event run so smoothly, to all the speakers including Anna Butcher , Katie Martinez-Thompson, Shawna Gibbs, Andrew Peake , Claire Hutchinson, Jennifer Cownie , Jamie Davison , Teresa Lindley , Sue Nithyanandan , Jonathan Tout , Shirine Khoury-Haq , Steph Wood, Mark McCammond , Steve Bassett , Tom Dant , Paul Sedgley , Bay Bashir , Josie Chamberlin, Paul Stone and Jack Matthews, and to our Conference24 sponsors Mondelez, Coca-Cola Euro-Pacific Partners, One Stop, Cook and Yeo Valley.