It's Time for Retailers to Move Past the Multichannel Conversation

It’s a great line I use sometimes, most recently in a meeting when the term multichannel kept popping up. Eventually I said, out loud, “I'm finished with the multichannel conversation!” Here’s what I mean:

How long have we been talking and asking about multichannel? You know the questions: “Do you have a multichannel marketing program?” “Do you know who your multichannel customers are?” “Do you know how much your multichannel customer spends?” We’ve been asking these questions for about as long as we’ve been using terms like relevance and one-to-one, which is a really long time. None of these terms are unimportant, but what’s next? What should we really be striving for now?