Retail Digital Pulse: A digital maturity assessment across Asia Pacific retail
Wave 2 - March' 2022
Google Cloud in partnership with IDC Retail Insights recently concluded the wave 2 of the Retail Digital Pulse to assess the digital maturity of retailers across the asia pacific region. The spotlight in this study was on Innovation Hotspots. This is a blog which I wrote at the time of launching the study and gives a good overview of Retail Digital Pulse and how asian retailers are accelerating their digital transformation bringing innovation to the forefront. Read the full article here.
Snapshot of the article here to get your started...
Like retailers everywhere, those in the Asian market have been severely impacted by COVID-19. Lockdowns and restrictions during the pandemic have resulted in store closures and lost sales, and even as most economies have started to rebound, recovery is expected to be slow for retailers—especially those who are at an early stage of digital transformation.
We are, however, now witnessing an accelerated shift to digital. Retailers have begun prioritizing the need to address the rapid shifts in consumer behavior as they build capabilities to deliver effective and efficient experiences at every stage of the shopping journey.
The Google Cloud Retail Digital Pulse assesses how Asia Pacific retailers are digitizing, building resiliency, and developing competencies to enable them to compete in a post-COVID world. The ongoing annual assessment led by IDC and Google puts a spotlight on the maturity of retail digital transformation in the Asia Pacific region, and covers retailers across markets and segments to investigate their digital maturity across five dimensions (strategy, people, data , technology and process) to arrive at a 4-stage Digital Pulse Index, with 4 being the most mature.
While the current study shows an overall increase in digital maturity over last year, the digital pulse of Asian retail is still relatively low with the majority, about 44%, in Stage 1 (Digital Participants), 29% in Stage 2 (Digital Explorers), 25% in Stage 3 (Digital Aspirant), while only 2% are deemed Digitally Resilient (Stage 4).
Digital maturity also varies across countries and segments with key insights relating to the challenges, focus areas, innovation hotspots and priority use cases. After you have downloaded the report, you can also assess the digital maturity rating for your organization and gain actionable guidance on how to develop a digital road-map for the future.
Let's dig into this further to look at this evolving retail landscape. Read the full article here for your reference