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Coresight Research and NextRivet spent a year testing out a scenario: How could a blend of their expertise help retailers and shopping center and mixed-use landlords grow sales, make operations more efficient and increase customer engagement? This month, the research consultancy and the proptech consultancy launched CoreRivet to combine Coresight’s research and NextRivet’s implementation in an end-to-end solution for clients, said NextRivet co-founder David Blumenfeld.
The partnership’s offering starts with Coresight Research, which CEO Deborah Weinswig founded in 2018. Coresight Research uses its research and data to help retailers and landlords strategize. That could be to plan store design, to plan shopping center design, to plan for artificial intelligence or other disruptors — and plenty other aspects of the business. Once a strategy is formed, NextRivet helps retailers and landlords put technology in place to achieve it. Blumenfeld and Kyle Spencer founded NextRivet in 2019 after about five years working together at Westfield Labs, which sought to integrate the physical and digital shopping experiences. Blumenfeld emphasized that NextRivet is tech-agnostic, meaning it is not biased toward or beholden to any particular technology or tech provider.
Blumenfeld and Weinswig anticipate that some CoreRivet clients will solicit the partnership’s services directly while others will begin the relationship with Coresight or NextRivet. They discussed CoreRivet and what it means for retailers and landlords with Commerce + Communities Today contributing editor Joe Gose.
Blumenfeld: When I was at Westfield, we had around 70 people, which is massive for a shopping center innovation group but still pretty small for what would be considered a tech company. A lot of shopping centers were struggling with how to innovate, and we founded NextRivet to help the industry. At the same time, Deb had done a phenomenal job of building the Coresight brand, and we were reading a lot of her research material. As clients began to engage us, they would ask for a bigger picture of what was happening in the industry. We could certainly prepare light trend reports, but the deeper research that they wanted wasn’t in our wheelhouse. So we reached out to Coresight and said: ‘Hey, we think there’s an opportunity.’ We piloted packaging our services together for clients a few times, and the results really resonated with the clients.
Weinswig: We do a lot of pricing and promotion [of retail products] and work backwards toward the supply chain and inventory allocation and demand forecasting. In many cases, our clients have either homegrown or legacy solutions, and we consider what they have and what could be. Along the way, we’re often helping them understand where they stand versus their competitors or the just the market.
Retail media [promotional marketing] is very critical. We have all the research in terms of what strategies have worked and what haven’t or what’s changing on the horizon. When we’re working with a tenant or landlord, maybe they’re using a certain retail media solution but it’s not performing the way they want it to or they feel that they can do more. That’s when we would reach out to CoreRivet and say: ‘Why is this not working? What can we do from here?’ In some cases, there may be a new technology coming out in the very near future that’s going to completely change the consumer, retailer and landlord experience for the positive. That, of course, is happening today with AI literally around the corner, and an AI solution will be pennies on the dollar compared to what they could have spent on some of these solutions. That’s what we find exciting.
Weinswig: David and I have no patience [she laughs]. We have deep and globally knowledgeable research and IT teams and don’t have to get up to speed on the industry and various sectors. So a project that might take someone else six months we can do in six to 12 weeks. We want to be in agreement, but at the same time, we are going to be consistent with our own beliefs. At the end of the day, we’re on a journey with the client to achieve the best outcome.
Blumenfeld: The way both of our companies work is not to just go off in a silo, do a bunch of tasks and then come back to deliver whatever the solution happens to be. It’s much more of an iterative process. We have weekly status meetings with clients to lay out where we are and what’s going to happen that week, and it’s not just [a client’s] reliance on us. Once we launch a project, for example, they can start to manage some of it themselves.
Weinswig: David and I have been talking about a massive change happening with [consumer packaged goods] and how we could see that affect physical real estate. In 2008 when I was with Citi, a banker came to me and said that we’d start to see traditional department store brands putting up their own storefronts. I thought it was a little bit out there because nobody was talking about it. Twenty years later, CPG grocery brands are starting to think about what their “storefront” would look like. We may have a playbook on how this works with the department store brands, but this is different. People know Oreo cookies, but they don’t know [Oreo brand owner] Mondelēz and you wouldn’t necessarily want to open a Mondelēz store. It might be a hard problem to solve, but I love the complexity and the opportunity is really interesting. In the future, we could see some CPG brands in a completely different way than we see them today.
Blumenfeld: One of the more obvious changes is the growth of AI and how it will play a role it retail. Things that retailers need to do make AI really interesting, from optimizing supply chains to introducing some type of dynamic pricing model. Then there are opportunities for the shopping center world to leverage AI beyond consumer-facing experiences. AI chatbots, for example, could act as a digital concierge for customer service. AI could also extend into many other aspects of the business on the hardcore proptech side, such as optimizing building management systems or having AI-powered cameras that can better understand mall traffic flows and improve loss-prevention efforts. And the reality is, most of these companies don’t have the expertise in-house, so we think we can come in and really accelerate cutting-edge digital solutions.
By Joe Gose
Contributor, Commerce + Communities Today
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