As the retail world faces into mounting change and uncertainty, the pressure grows even stronger on retail CEOs to develop not only robust new strategies but also a new style of leadership. International retail expert, Alan Treadgold, sets out how retailers should prioritise and focus in order to navigate their way through the new retail landscape.

Alan Treadgold, international retail expert and co-author of 'Navigating the New Retail Landscape: A Guide for Business Leaders'

For those of us blessed to live there, retailing in London looks magnificent in Spring 2025.  The people are back, the tourists are back, the iconic department stores are exactly as great department stores should be, new stores are being opened, new formats brought to market.  People are socialising, eating, being entertained and they are walking around this great city carrying the bags that signify their purchases.   

But as we all know, all is not sunshine and smiles in retail land.  As Charles Dickens, surely one of London’s greatest adopted sons (and who amongst us is not to at least some degree an adopted son of this most welcoming and diverse of cities?), wrote as the opening line of one of his finest works – A Tale of Two Cities – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”   

Like World Retail Congress, Dickens’ novel was set in London (WRC 2025) and Paris (WRC 2024) against a backdrop of tumult and unrest in Europe – the French Revolution for Dickens, the war in Ukraine for WRC. 

That the retailing industry in London, Paris and throughout the world faces challenges and uncertainties is surely not in any doubt.  Retailing is both shaped by and a mirror of the societies and locations in which it exists, and if those societies and locations are experiencing great challenges and uncertainties, as they surely are, then so too is the retailing industry.  It is often said that optimism and a glass half full outlook is an essential characteristic of those tasked with leading and running retail businesses.   

This feels at least as true today as it has ever done.  How prescient, therefore, of World Retail Congress to take as its themes for the 2025 Congress ‘Faster, bolder, smarter’; themes which feel appropriately Olympian as the Congress moves from one three-time host City of the Games to another.   

To pursue the Olympic analogy a little further, all of the greatest Olympians say that success is simply what happens when the processes have been put in place and the heavy lifting and the hard unglamorous training has been done.   

The first piece of heavy lifting that retail business leaders must do is to understand and make sense of the worlds in which they operate – the consumer landscapes, the competitor set, the political, economic, technology and societal context.  Accepting ‘the certainty of uncertainty’ has rarely felt more necessary than it does today.  This alone is no small task.  But it is in periods of discontinuous and disruptive change that opportunities are also at their greatest.  

How then to not just survive but also thrive in such disruptive and disrupted worlds?  As Alan Kay, one of the great architects of the modern technology age (‘computer scientist’ is far too small a descriptor), said: ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’  This means accepting that there is no single route map to achieving success because in the world in which we live there is no single definitive view of what the future even looks like.   

But there are critically important building blocks that will contribute decisively to achieving out-performance and enduring success.  For the retail enterprise, these include being truly customer centric, being digitally skilled, emphasising innovation, and (re)turning to strong and clear values.   

For those tasked with leading retail enterprises the personal skillset required is considerable.  As well as being comfortable operating in environments of great uncertainty, there must be a willingness to challenge assumptions and conventions within the business, to widen the risk envelope, champion innovation and have the capacity to prioritize that which is important rather than merely urgent. 

There is no doubt that the last several years have been notably difficult and challenging for many retailers around the world.  Olympic athletes who fail on any given day usually have another competition in which to try to achieve success.  Retailers rarely have that opportunity.  For retailers the price of failure is often industry exit.  But the graveyard of retailers who have disappeared in recent years is mostly filled with those who resisted change, rather than those who tried to change too much.  So embrace change, be innovative and aspire to be even faster, even bolder, even smarter.

The far less often quoted part of the first paragraph of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities goes on to say that, ‘it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness.’ There is more, but this will suffice.  So, attend the 2025 World Retail Congress to live in wisdom, belief and light; not foolishness, incredulity and darkness.  And perhaps also invest in a copy of my book which explores in detail these and other themes and presents multiple case studies of world-class retailers pursuing world-leading initiatives. 

About the author: 

Alan Treadgold is a London-based advisor to a wide range of retail and consumer businesses around the world.  In his 30-year career he has run advertising agencies and management consultancy practices in a number of countries.  He is a regular writer and speaker on change and transformation in the retail industry.  His latest book, ‘Navigating the New Retail Landscape: A Guide for Business Leaders’, was co-authored with Professor Jonathan Reynolds, Deputy Dean at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School.  It was published as a fully revised third edition by Oxford University Press in April 2025.  Readers of this article can obtain a 30% discount on the cover price by either going to the OUP website and entering the code AUFLY30 or using the following link: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/navigating-the-new-retail-landscape-9780198935179?promocode=AUFLY30