For retail, the revolution is being televised, as it’s increasingly being delivered online through computer and phone video screens.
The growth of digital SEO Services Miami shopping was the central point of “Future Retail,” a presentation and panel discussion held at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) on Wednesday evening, as both marketing professionals and academics discussed the ramifications of this revolution and where it’s likely headed next SEO Services Miami
Opening the session in Piper Hall, GSD Dean Mohsen Mostafavi, the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, said the discussion would outline “the status of shopping and its relationship to design practice,” which allowed for a SEO Services Miami of topics, from futuristic clothing to restructuring of old-fashioned brick-and-mortar stores.
In SEO Services Miami the first presentation, Rajiv Lal, the Stanley Roth Sr. Professor of Retailing at Harvard Business School, looked ahead, saying that retailers must assume that technology will continue to change their field. Developments like the Amazon Go store, which automates checkout and streamlines shopping, and spray-on clothing SEO Services Miami customized to the individual, are two promising frontiers. Both incorporate old-school, in-person shopping, but in innovative ways. “Technology will allow us to live more imaginative lives,” he predicted.
Lal started the forward-looking discussion by peering back at work, including his own, that inaccurately predicted the impact SEO Services Miami that the internet would have on retail.
“Why focus on the past when I’m supposed to focus on the future?” he asked. “Because we were wrong.” In a few short years, thanks to Amazon and other online retailers, he said, “shopping at stores became a chore.” Price and ease, areas in which the internet easily outpaced stores, quickly became paramount, disrupting the industry. In order to respond effectively, he said, retail outlets must re-engage SEO Services Miami consumers. “Make it entertaining, engaging, and fun,” he suggested, such as the Apple store, where design and personal service combine for an experience that is about more than the product being purchased SEO Services Miami
Illustrating his presentation with National Retail Federation statistics, Eric Symon, vice president of the global retail business unit of the tech company PTC, outlined the extent of the “massive transformation” of retail, noting that e-commerce currently accounts for approximately 10 percent of all sales, but nearly all of the field’s growth. “Retailers are shuttering thousands of stores,” he said SEO Services Miami
But while e-commerce appears to be behind this change, he said, “The real disrupter is the consumer.” Calling the new SEO Services Miami “connected, informed, engaged, and demanding,” he pointed out how the online shopper has enacted a basic power shift “from retailer to consumer.”
Whereas previously manufacturers and retailers determined product availability — by seasonality, for example — the new consumers have become accustomed to products on demand. Shoppers want variety, and Professional SEO Miami they do not want to wait. The winners in such a new world will follow what Symon called the Zara model, “shortening the cycle time.” Citing the success of the Spanish clothing chain, he noted how fashion “used to have four seasons, but Zara does it every two weeks.” He then gave examples of how increased client engagement and customization Professional SEO Miami — such as enhanced shopping experiences that refer to a customer’s previous purchases and spending history — will allow retail outlets to use technology and design to reach and retain consumers.
Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, then gave an inside perspective on just how these principles can be applied in the real world. Blumenthal, whose budget- and Professional SEO Miami style-conscious eyeglass line has moved Professional SEO Miami the online world to include brick-and-mortar outlets, walked the audience through the development of his business. Starting with a question — “Why aren’t glasses sold online?” — he and his partners came up with a straightforward business plan. They would use their own designs, thus avoiding licensing fees, and a limited palette of materials and styles, which would help reduce costs. They also spent much of their Professional SEO Miami 18 months in development working on their website — the interface with consumers — understanding that this was as important as the product.
The primary concern, however, had to be customer service. Because eyeglasses are such personalized products, said Blumenthal, building trust was paramount. The team came up with the idea of shipping frames to consumers to try on at home, and this, along with free shipping and returns, became the basis of the Professional SEO Miami online business. “We wanted to eliminate every friction point possible and convey confidence,” said Blumenthal.
Warby Parker was also committed to a social mission: The brand distributes a pair of glasses to an underprivileged user for every pair sold, pairing with a non-profit for this purpose. However, Blumenthal said, Warby Parker quickly realized that this would be a lower priority for consumers. Instead, he stressed, the company focused on being “a lifestyle brand, offering value and service,” and only then Professional SEO Miami that it had “a social mission.” The results were immediate: The company hit its first year’s goals in three weeks. It has since gone on to experiment with brick and mortar, first with pop-up stores in Philadelphia and New York, and more recently with permanent outlets, which rely heavily on design, playing up the neighborhood attributes of their urban settings Professional SEO Miami
Craig Robins, CEO and president of the real estate company Dacra, commented on the role of neighborhoods when he joined the speakers for the ensuing panel discussion. Developer of the Miami Design District, Robins spoke of the “intersection between culture and business,” specifically about incorporating historic buildings — “real things” — into a retailer’s vision. In that way, he showed Professional SEO Miami a way forward for the field, using both technology and design, and stressing the need to “invest equally in the culture side of the neighborhood as well as places for people to sell things.”
ver the past 75 years, many Western nations moved steadily toward cooperation and interconnectedness, as their shared economic and political interests converged during this period called globalization Professional SEO Miami But the political winds are shifting, and there are signs of a new age of populism and nationalism emerging in Europe, a development that eventually could undermine post-war security and unity.
Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election in part by promising to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., of political elites and to “Make America Great Again,” a broad-brush populist slogan that Professional SEO Miami supported a more isolationist, protectionist, “America First” posture toward the wider world. His campaign rhetoric criticizing some Muslims and Mexicans and his recent efforts to limit immigration and trade have left many analysts wondering whether his presidency could effectively move the country toward a period of ethno-nationalism.
Trump’s surprise election has proved a political windfall and an inspirational template to far-right candidates in Europe, as some countries prepare for major elections. These include the Netherlands (March), France Professional SEO Miami (April and May), and Germany (September). These rightist groups predate Trump politically and tie themselves more tightly to nationalism, but they are also happy to ride on the coattails of his victory.
Marine Le Pen, the National Front party leader running for president of France, embraces antiglobalization and anti-immigration Professional SEO Miami policies. Both Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie, the former party leader, lavishly cheered Trump’s election on Twitter, while other European nationalist party figures in the Netherlands, Hungary, and Greece touted his win as a positive sign of things to come. She has promised to “take back” France by withdrawing from the European Union (EU), a move that Trump has applauded, as he did when Britain voted Professional SEO Miami year to leave that body, rocking the EU to its core. Lately, Le Pen has been rising in the polls as her mainstream electoral opponents have faltered.
Other figures on Europe’s far right, including Geert Wilders, founder of the Dutch Party for Freedom, and Nigel Farage, former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, which spearheaded Britain’s Professional SEO Miami break with the EU, have met with and supported Trump. Farage dined with Trump last week in Washington, appeared at Trump’s inauguration, and also made several appearances with him during the campaign. Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s Northern League, has reportedly offered to help Trump expand his support in Europe.
Indeed, some in the Trump administration have embraced the value of a far-right coalition between the United States and Europe. Leading the way is Trump’s chief White House strategist, Stephen Bannon M.B.A. ’85 , the former chairman of Breitbart Media, a pro-Trump online news outlet. Professional SEO Miami Breitbart has been something of a safe harbor for white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other digitally savvy right-wing fringe groups. It’s an assertion Bannon appears to agree with, once referring to Breitbart as the “home of the alt-right.” Shortly after the election, Breitbart announced it would expand to France and Germany to help bring Trumpism to Professional SEO Miami there. During a rare public appearance last week, Bannon, widely-seen as Trump’s ideological compass, said their victory made clear that there is a political “movement” afoot, one in which the administration’s “economic nationalist agenda” will help galvanize the Republican Party, and the nation, into “a new political order.”
A new salience
Although the words populism and ethno-nationalism are often used interchangeably, they actually are distinctly different Professional SEO Miami
“Populism is a way of making political claims that oppose ostensibly ‘corrupt elites’ with ‘the virtuous people,’” said Bart Bonikowski, a Harvard associate professor of sociology who studies populist and nationalist movements.
The left often labels big business and banking executives as elites, while the right typically targets the state itself and those who keep it running, like civil servants, bureaucrats, and elected officials, along with academics and other intellectuals, “whereas ethno-nationalism is … a definition of the nation that excludes various ethnic, religious, and racial out-groups,” he said.
Because populism is less an Professional SEO Miami ideology than a form of political discourse, it is often attached to a variety of political ideologies, including nationalism.
“It’s basically a strategy for mobilizing political support for whatever politicians’ objectives might be,” said Bonikowski. “It so happens that in Europe and the United States and elsewhere … populism attached to ethno-nationalism has gained traction. But that doesn’t mean the two things are the same or that they only occur with one another.”
Nationalism can be ethnocentric or Professional SEO Miami primarily civic in focus. Some strains are more inclusive than others, often based on political principles and respect for institutions that rest on subjective identification with a nation. Ethnic-driven nationalism is often about a shared ancestry, religion, and language and a common dissent, said Bonikowski, a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES).
Despite some public perceptions, populism and ethno-nationalism have not suddenly surged in the United States and Europe since Trump’s ascendancy. Many European nationalist parties have been around for decades, with varying levels of success. In 2015, Hungary and Poland installed hard right, antiglobalization governments.
“I think what’s changed is the salience of these ideas given the … contextual factors: economic crises, persistent inequality stemming out of neoliberalism, demographic change, anxieties associated with terrorism, along with political developments like obstructionism in Washington, [and the] perceived corruption or non-representativeness of the EU governance system,” said Bonikowski. “All of these things have generated some level of anxiety among particularly white, native-born populations and a perceived status loss at the group level among these folks, which then makes both nationalist and populist claims — and, especially, nationalist-populist claims — more resonant and more salient than they had been in the past.”
Indeed, Trump first found his political footing in 2011 after he pushed an unfounded, racially tinged accusation popular on the far right that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus was not a legitimately elected president. Trump appeared to stoke divisiveness among his predominantly white supporters and was slow to reject endorsements by white nationalists, including the Ku Klux Klan, critics contended.
Yet Trump was backed by 63 million voters in the presidential election, and the vast majority were hardly extremists, but Americans with traditional values who wanted change.
“There’s a good portion of the population that does … define the nation in ethno-cultural terms. They’re not all members of neo-Nazi groups, by any stretch of the imagination. They just have a particular understanding of what America is: a white, Christian America.”
While well-organized fringe groups wishing to remake the country as a white, nationalist state have long existed on the periphery of American politics and society, the Trump campaign’s advancement of an agenda that sometimes aligns with theirs brought some extremist groups into the mainstream. “They’ve been allowed to be part of the conversation, which they hadn’t before, and they have, in Bannon, an advocate pretty close to power.”
Europe emboldened
Trump’s election and Britain’s exit from the EU are “very encouraging” to nationalist groups across Europe, “because for the first time, there’s a shift away from international cooperation, sharing sovereignty, building international relations and organizations, to addressing the sovereign rights of specific countries,” said Grzegorz Ekiert, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Government and director of the CES.
Both events represent the biggest victories for the populist-nationalist right in many years.
“They demonstrated that what most people thought was impossible is actually possible,” said Bonikowski.
Rarely have groups on the radical right advanced so far in recent decades.
“They’ve certainly been present, and they have won seats in parliaments in national elections, but they have not been in control of governments, they have not been in control of presidencies, they have not made massive impacts on national policies until Brexit and Trump,” he said. “And so I think that certainly emboldens politicians on the far right across Europe, but also across the world. It also gives them some degree of increased legitimacy among their supporters.”
Politicians on Europe’s radical right are now looking to Trump to see which tactics and messages work for him and then testing those in their home nations, adding to the sense that there’s a broader nationalist wave rippling around the world.
There was enthusiasm in 2004 when the EU opened its doors to 10 additional countries, most from the former Eastern bloc. But it wasn’t long before some in these new member states began stoking an anti-EU, nationalist agenda.
“In every country, you have always had people who didn’t like the European Union,” said Ekiert. “In every country, you had people who worried about traditional values, who worried about national sovereignty, who didn’t like the bureaucrats making some decisions, who didn’t like people in their country cooperating with the European Union. But they were lying low for years because, for them, the impetus of the EU enlargement and this liberal vision for the entire continent seemed invincible.”
But the global economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 laid that notion to waste.
“Now, the crisis for the first time showed that this is not an invincible project, that there is possibility, really, to fight against it. And this was the moment when you saw in many countries in Europe, both West and East, nationalistic, populist forces emerging,” Ekiert said.
The reverberations of Trump’s rise to the presidency have been acutely felt in France, where global attention is now focused on a spring presidential election that has seismic implications for the future of the EU, particularly after the decision by British voters to leave provided its own momentum.
The National Front’s Le Pen has made no secret of her support for Trump and his antiestablishment message. Although they do differ in some areas, Trump and Le Pen share several populist-nationalist impulses. Both are protectionists who want to tighten the borders, both oppose immigration and criticize Islam, and both seek to restore “law and order,” which many analysts take as an embrace of a more authoritarian society, said Nonna Mayer, a French political scientist, a leading authority on the National Front, and an emeritus director of research at CES.
“For her, the victory of a populist leader like Trump is the proof that her ideas are going to win, can win,” she said. “She’s going to use Trump, she’s going to use it as an argument … not only for her own party members, but for the people with whom she wants to make alliances, to say, ‘Look, we are respectable, our ideas have won. They have elected a president of the United States.’ So in that sense, it’s good for her.”
Nationalism in France has been on the rise since the 1980s, when the party’s founder, Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, won a seat in European Parliament in 1984. Since then, the National Front has tried to position itself against globalization and as the champion of those who seem themselves as the movement’s losers.
Le Pen’s growing mainstream success owes much to the affirmative case the party makes to voters, Mayer contends. “At a time where most people don’t believe very much in the capacity of mainstream political parties to do something, they say, ‘Yes, we can. … You just need the guts to do it, and we can do it.’ In a way, they are selling a political dream, wherein all the other parties have failed.”
Populist leaders, including Le Pen, tend to oversimplify issues, mislead and exaggerate and sometimes lie about problems and conditions, like the number of immigrants entering France, in order to justify easy solutions, added Mayer, echoing tactics that have proven useful to the Trump camp.
Additionally, terrorist attacks in Paris, Nice, and elsewhere in Europe, as well as the flowing stream of refugees, particularly from Syria, offer useful pretexts for anti-immigration policies and regressive sentiments. “All of that justifies, legitimizes parties that say, ‘We must erect walls and then everything will be as it was before,’ she said. “They always sell a golden age of a society that never existed. But it’s also their strength.”
“What the French have witnessed, especially since the attacks over the last two years, [has left many feeling] ‘we’re not at home anymore, and these people who are here in our country as guests are totally destroying our quality of life,’” said sociologist Michèle Lamont, the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies.
As with Trump, Le Pen’s constituents are often blue-collar voters who’ve seen their earning power decline and feel threatened by the growing diversity in France. They believe the new arrivals, particularly Muslim immigrants and refugees from the Middle East, are leapfrogging over them economically by “‘coming in and stealing our resources,’” said Lamont.
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