Eyes on future: GMDC|Retail Tomorrow marks 50 years
Officials at GMDC|Retail Tomorrow want the world to know that they are hard at work reinventing the association, making sure that the next 50 years will bring as much innovation and partnership between retailers, distributors and suppliers as the first half of the century did.
Colorado Springs, Colo.-based GMDC|Retail Tomorrow is turning 50 this year and, as the organization hits middle age, it is in the midst of a complete redesign, including the launch of its Retail Tomorrow initiative that quickly has become a key component of its offering, as well as the rebranding of its annual Health, Beauty and Wellness show as the Selfcare Summit.
Yet executives at the association are quick to note that their ability to keep current on industry trends — and serve as a resource to its retailer and supplier members — goes back to its founding in 1970, when food wholesalers came together to create an association focused on bringing more general merchandise and HBW products into their stores.
“I’ve always taken a great deal of pride in the fact that not only was GMDC born out of disruption, it has continually served as a disruptor for its own industry throughout its history,” said Michael Winterbottom, GMDC|Retail Tomorrow’s vice president of information technology and chief technology officer, who has been at the organization since 1998. “Six food wholesalers came together to collaboratively form GMDC as a response to the significant disruption in their own industry caused by the introduction of nonfoods into the food channel.”
Since then, GMDC|Retail Tomorrow has been striving to keep abreast of the ongoing changes in retail — and trying to help its members come out ahead during particularly disruptive eras.
“If you think about the history of the organization — coming together to enable grocery wholesale to serve their retail customers with a broader range of products — over the years, it has taken a more expansive view around insights, education, and how we provide guidance to our members on where a growth opportunity can be found,” said Patrick Spear, president and CEO of GMDC|Retail Tomorrow, who joined the organization in 2014 having spent almost 20 years with various CPG suppliers as a member.
As Spear tells it, the past 20 years has seen GMDC|Retail Tomorrow working to be as nimble as possible as retail changed. “In the mid-2000s, the objective was that we take a more expansive view globally. At the time, retail was becoming more global in nature, and I think at that time the leadership of the organization was really looking to say, ‘How do we connect our members to suppliers, products, ideas and innovation from outside the United States?’”
Thus, in 2007, the erstwhile General Merchandise Distributors Council became the Global Market Development Center, reflecting the organization’s global focus and interest in being a resource for its members’ development.
A critical component of growing that focus into a forward-looking organization in the past several years has been due to emphasis that GMDC|Retail Tomorrow places on hearing what its members’ needs are in order to direct its efforts.
“As we evolved, it was integral that we hear the voice of the member,” said Tom Duffy, vice president of member development. “How we continue to communicate where we’re going, gaining alignment with our members and having that feedback loop so we can always create value for them has always been really important.”
Duffy said that in this, GMDC|Retail Tomorrow is very good at community management and creating a community. As evidenced by its rebrand more than a decade ago, creating this community has gone hand in hand with constantly evaluating the value it is delivering to its members. In the past several years, this has meant two things — changing its annual HBW conference and rebranding it as the Selfcare Summit, and launching Retail Tomorrow.
Retail Tomorrow organizes City Immersions in major cities in the United States and Canada that have a penchant for innovation. The two-day immersions feature store tours and visits to cutting-edge companies, as well as events in which entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to attendees, á la “Shark Tank.” The beginnings of Retail Tomorrow, just like the origins of GMDC in the 1970s, were rooted in bringing retailers together around a shared goal — pre-empting and preparing for disruption.
“I came in with a belief that we need to find ways to better connect the industry, retailers, suppliers, etc., to what’s coming next,” Spear said. “And that’s how Retail Tomorrow was born — a relatively simple idea. It is a GMDC initiative that connects the industry to a broader ecosystem. It could be the disruptive technologies, it could be disruptive products and it could be disruptive services that will inform the shopping experience of the future.”
Ultimately, Retail Tomorrow offers “a platform to enable discovery of innovation to find the things that will create a better shopping experience, to enable retailers to think differently about products, services or technologies,” Spear said
GMDC|Retail Tomorrow offers an assortment of insights-focused resources for members, including data portals for Nielsen and IRI data. The key component of Retail Tomorrow, according to Duffy, has been “bringing those insights to life.” The interactive element of Retail Tomorrow’s City Immersions also brought back learnings and features to GMDC|Retail Tomorrow’s two annual conferences, among them the entrepreneur pitches, added to conferences as “Mic Drop,” which Duffy said “has become a core component of the discovery that retailers and wholesalers find exceptionally stimulating and exciting, and efficient for them to use.”
Adding new features to existing meetings was part of a larger overhaul of its HBW event, which it relaunched as Selfcare Summit last year. Spear said that its creation was driven by the macro trends associated with the larger healthcare ecosystem after the Affordable Care Act, in which insurance deductibles increased and consumers have turned to at-home methods of protecting their health and remedying certain conditions.
“All of our health-and-wellness categories — and for that matter, many of our merchandise categories — fit directly into this notion of self-care,” Spear said. “In 2019, when we launched the Selfcare Summit, we did so with a goal to reimagine how our industry thinks about the role they play with consumer health care.”
The Selfcare Summit is designed to help GMDC|Retail Tomorrow members capitalize on the strengths of the industry. “I really look at our retailers as ideally situated to help with self-care needs of consumers, and that’s something I think presents a tremendous opportunity moving forward,” Spear said. “It’s something that hasn’t been easily replicated holistically with the pure-play e-commerce players.”
Duffy, whose team managed to make the Selfcare Summit overhaul happen in just 10 months, said that it reflects a subtle but important change in the focus of the event — and the association by extension. “We were historically focused only on the retail part of the business,” he said. “But what we did strategically is to say to ourselves, ‘Everybody’s focused on the consumer, so why aren’t we?’ It’s a subtle change, but our focus is going to the consumer because that’s what our members are focused on.”
As part of this, the Selfcare Summit included learning tracks that offered an educational component to the show. Duffy said that this was an area in which the association asked members what they wanted to learn about in order to better tailor the programming. This year’s conference, slated for Oct. 1-5 in Atlanta (the organization’s General Merchandise Conference is co-located in Atlanta from Sept. 30 to Oct. 4), will double down on providing attendees the resources they need to succeed, Spear said.
“This year, we’re going to be very focused around how we continue to provide content that is incremental to the industry around insights that will help drive their growth, drive better retail experience, drive greater consumer loyalty and satisfaction,” he said.
In order to help identify opportunities within self-care for members, GMDC|Retail Tomorrow teamed up with Hamacher Resource Group, based in Waukesha, Wis., to create the Selfcare Roadmap, a digital tool that offers access to more than 230 infographics and insights on shoppers and self-care categories, showing geographic breakdowns of consumers affected and highlighting categories they co-buy with the condition they’re shopping for and more. “This was really foundational to us, reimagining our conference to help our members understand beyond just health.”
As it moves forward in a world changed by the COVID-19 pandemic, GMDC|Retail Tomorrow and its leadership have been focused on getting its members through the crisis, showcasing the organization’s adaptability throughout. At the onset of states issuing shelter-in-place measures, GMDC|Retail Tomorrow leadership reached out to retail and wholesale members to see if there was a need for an opportunity to share challenges and best practices with their peers.
“The intent is to create a conversation that enables our members, enables our owners to learn, to get better insights, to find better solutions in real time,” Spear said. “And that’s been a really powerful platform for us here over the last three months, and something we expect to continue.”
One of the key insights that emerged from these meetings has been the fact that the pandemic has forced what Spear called a “soft reset,” giving retailers “an opportunity to take stock of how we are executing and how we can execute better. I think, for both brands and retailers, there is a tremendous opportunity,” he said. “And something we’ve explored with the Resilient Retail Roundtable is how to use this to reset around trust.” Spear also said that increased trust in retail can lead to increased shopper loyalty, provided retailers can deliver on customer needs.
To that end, GMDC|Retail Tomorrow is wasting no time in working to create virtual experiences via Retail Tomorrow. Retail Tomorrow will launch a four-part series on July 15 that will seek to recreate the experiential element of City Immersions in a method that goes beyond a webinar.
What all of these efforts indicate is that even as it celebrates 50 years and helps members navigate a pandemic, GMDC|Retail Tomorrow already is thinking about the next 50 years. More to the point, it already is thinking about programming that will support the industry to stay ahead of the curve in the years to come.
“If you think about the notion that things have changed now with an eye on the future and how we inspire the customer and make their day, that’s where the opportunity is going to be,” Spear said. “I see plenty of opportunities for us to continue to connect the industry, to drive innovation, to drive loyalty, to drive greater shopping experiences for the customer.”