Conference Programme 2024

This essential track focuses on two of retail’s hottest topics; AI and data whist also looking at innovation through a retail lens. 

You’ll learn how embrace and make sense of AI and Gen AI for competitive advantage, how to drive engagement through immersive experiences and what retail innovation really looks like in 2024 for driving your business forward.

The track also looks at placing true insight and decision making at the core of your data strategy, maximising innovation through collaboration with start-ups and creating real customer engagement through industry-leading augmented reality.    

Is the future of commerce exclusively digital? Almost certainly not. Yet some of the UK’s largest retailers earn more revenue online than through their stores, and these two worlds are coming together fast – either by design or because consumers demand it.

The slow revolution in retail towards a blended offering is reaching some kind of end game currently, and our daytime conference will explore the component parts that we think will make up any successful digital business for a retailer who currently owns a store estate.

With the cost-of-living-crisis still hitting hard; customer engagement and loyalty are more essential than ever for retail.   

In this crucial track you’ll learn how to strengthen your loyalty strategy for market share, boost sales through next-level personalisation and understand social commerce’s role in an ever-changing marketing landscape. 

You’ll also hear how to use innovation and creativity for customer acquisition, how to build a pricing strategy when customer are more price-sensitive, how to truly differentiate your store and how retail marketing will develop by 2027. 

In a tough economy effective leadership and workforce strategy are fundamental to a retailer’s profit and market share.   

This headline theatre track focuses on how retail HR is changing as AI and cost reduction grow in importance, how to evaluate international growth opportunities effectively and what great retail leadership actually looks like in 2024. 

You’ll also learn how to drive competitive advantage through an impactful ESG strategy, what the economic outlook is for retail for the rest of the year, how to engage your workforce through effective DEI initiatives and how retail leaders are responding to a highly challenging, unpredictable macro-economic environment.    

In this engaging track you’ll learn how to balance sustainability goals and profits even in a cost-conscious environment, how you can simplify sustainability to drive impact and competitive advantage and how the retail sector can collaborate to maximize sustainability within supply chain . 

You’ll also learn how to boost sales and customer experience through effective stock management, how to increase efficiency through robot delivery, how to meet customers’ speed expectations through supply chain agility and which delivery innovations will make you stand out from your competitors. 

With a steep rise in both store theft and cyber security breaches, this important track focuses on how retailers can fight back more effectively to protect stores and colleagues, how loss prevention will develop by 2027 and how to rethink cyber security for substantially stronger protection. 

In the crucial payments space, you’ll learn how to increase transactions through making mobile payment friction-free, how to embrace tokenisation to improve security and transaction speed and how retailers and can maximise transactions in 2024 through an effective payments strategy.