Why The Longer Game?

If you're listening to this transmission, it is the year 2145. The Earth has been destroyed and you are the only humanoid left.

Siiiiiiiike!

Okay, what you're really here for is The Longer Game. And you might be asking yourself, what is The Longer Game? Allow me to explain. My name is Michael. I run an Amazon service agency called Cartology. I've been running that for the past five years. One of the things that I've noticed is the retail landscape is changing people. It's not staying the same.

It is the year 2021 right now. And we recently experienced a global pandemic. And besides being terrible, and bringing a horrible disease to everyone, it has changed consumer behavior, and more people are shopping online than ever before. That got me thinking though, beyond just online. What is the general retail landscape look like? A lot of people see the future as robots and everything being automated.

I disagree with that. I don't think that everything's going to become 100% automated, that robots are going to take over our jobs. And here's why… humans want connection and humans want a tactile experience. Let me explain.

As an Amazon service agency, we work with other providers, other vendors who do things and there's a photography company that was providing 360 degree photographs for brands on Amazon. There was a bug spray that added a 360 degree photo to their product listing. Okay. Why would you need to see a bug spray in 360? It's bug spray. You just want to know what it does, right? Well, they improved their conversion rate by 10% by adding that 360 degree photo. Why is that important? Humans want to have the closest thing to a physical interaction as possible.

We're never going to totally be isolated. And I think if that did happen, we would eventually die off as a species. But we're not here to talk about evolution.

What we're here to talk about is retail and retail reimagined, what's happening in retail stores, what's the future of shopping malls and brick & mortar stores? Why is Amazon so important? Why is ecommerce growing as a part of the total retail sector? Who's going to come in as a marketplace and compete with Amazon? Likely Walmart. There are a lot of questions to be asked and to be answered.

This podcast is the quest for finding those answers and asking those questions. The guests that are going to come on are going to be varying subject matter experts across the board when it comes to retail. We might have a retail analyst. We might have an Amazon consultant. You might have an ecommerce agency that helps people to develop websites and runs ads. There are a lot of different people that are going to be on here and we want to get diversity of thought so that we have a better idea of what retail is going to look like in the future.

If you're ready, please keep your hands all hands and feet inside the cart at all times. We're getting ready to take off.

Are you going to join me or are you going to get out of the cart?

I suggest you join me.

Here we go.