’s taken place in the industry, which is forcing retailers to reinvent themselves right across the board,” he said. “The idea of customer centricity goes way beyond the idea that you just always ask the question, is this what the customer wants?” Adamant that the successful retailers of the future will adopt data driven, channel agnostic approaches, Umber argues that the customer centricity doesn’t mean the customer is always right. “What the customer wants is stuff for free, right now – none of us can actually deliver that. “It’s not about giving the customer what they want, it’s about understanding the customer so that you can then run a good business that’s flexible to what they need and want,” Umbers explained. According to Umbers, the idea that consistency is the hallmark of good retailing has faded, and is in conflict with how retailers should be thinking about the future. “Consistency became one of the benchmarks of what good retail was, but for me that’s in conflict with the idea of customer centricity. “If you take a chain of retail stores all operating in different markets with different customer profiles, how can it be logical that a cookie cutter approach could be consistent with customer centric thinking?” Umbers said. The new way of thinking has led Myer towards changing the way they think about their stores, implementing a localized model that they’ve been rolling out to their 66 stores nationwide. “It forces you to evermore local decisions … you allow individual stores to express their own personalization and develop out their own unique offerings that are relevant to local markets. “As soon as you give a store manager license to make their own decisions, given their understanding of their customer base, they will very naturally migrate towards unique solutions that fit their store,” Umbers said. “The more you belief in customer centricity the more you also believe that retail is something that happens at a very local level.” Myer’s new philosophy will be central to the upcoming opening of their new concept in Warringah, which Umbers believes will be a new benchmark for department store retailing. “Customer centricity will play out through [Warringah], we’ve laid out the brands we think we should have. We’ve got a completely new training package for the employees so that they all have a natural resonance with the people that will come in to the store,” he said. Myer closed the Warringah store earlier this year, and will unveil the new concept alongside a new John Lewis brand offering that’s been specifically targeted at the store. “We believe [John Lewis] will have a particularly strong resonance with the type of people that are in that marketplace,” Umbers said. “We made a statement [at Warringah]. Because it’s been closed we can do a grand reveal. It’s a perfect opportunity to say, ‘is this what you thought our brand was all about? Or is this something special that resets your expectations of what we do?’” Concluding his remarks, Umbers challenged his competitors and colleagues to rethink the way they do business and move beyond the conventional understanding of what customer centricity means. “The simple phrase of customer centricity is glibly used across the industry, and I think quite often people don’t think about its deep implications for the way we think about our business.” “I challenge people to look beyond the use of the word and understand how that principle actually plays out if you push it far enough.”