Inappropriate Adaptation of Information Communication and Computation Technologies (ICCT) by Indian Brick-and-Mortar Lifestyle Retailers – Insights from an Experiment

The complex nature of brick-and-mortar lifestyle retailing both from supply-side and demand-side owing to a sheer vast number of unique designs, products, brands, and categories the retailer mandatorily need to offer in their stores as part of their product assortment, added with limitation in terms of opportunity available for the store to retain consumers for a longer period just because of increasing competition from both organized and unorganized lifestyle retailers, makes it furthermore important for any organized brick-and-mortar lifestyle retailer to be more careful and efficient in ensuring appropriate adaptation of emerging information communication and computation tools (ICCT). It is observed that a majority of lifestyle retailers in India believe that they have adopted the latest ICCT tools and solutions and are yielding accurate outputs that can be used for interpretation and decision-making. This belief/assumption always distracts them from evaluating the adaptation level of existing ICCT tools and solutions by their employees across levels in the hierarchy, rather they spend most of their time finding ICCT tools and solutions which are new in the market to be integrated with their existing systems. In these six months’ long research work we have evaluated the existing adaptation level and understanding of ICCT of a select national level brick-and-mortar lifestyle retailer in India; identified key loopholes in ICCT adaptation; experimented to derive insights and inferences, and suggested appropriate adaptation methods for efficient usage of ICCT. Results have demonstrated that rather working on identifying new ICCT tools and solutions if the retailer just focuses on modifying the input methodologies of their existing ICCT tools and solution they would reduce overall expenses incurred by them in returning the inventory which is ordered using an ICCT by 74.31 percent and also save on their overall consumer communication expenses by 19.82 percent