Ep 9 - Doug Stephens, RetailProphet.com, author of Resurrecting Retail: The future of business in a post-pandemic world

Mega-Brands: Investing in Mega Trends & the Mega Brands Best Positioned to Add Value to Your Wallet

Today I have the honor of talking retail trends with the leading expert in retail & brand strategy, Doug Stephens. Doug is an award winning author with 3 books analyzing the retail industry and his latest book, Resurrecting Retail is my new favorite. Doug has the ear of the major brands for important strategic decisions made inside boardrooms. The knowledge he has of the retail industry, its forward-looking trends and which brands are remaining highly relevant offers enormous advantages for executives in the industry as well as investors who want to invest in these great brands. In today's conversation we talk about Amazon and where he thinks this great business is headed next. We talk about other great brands like Nike and Target and what the future needs to look like for brands that want to compete in an e-commerce world. I enjoyed talking about the U.S. retail industry and contrasting it with China's up and coming e-commerce driven retail landscape. We talked about experiences being small nuggets of content which when added up make for a total experience through the eyes of the consumer. Experiences are what will keep physical retail from being relevant yet very few brands have strong expertise here.

There are too many insights in this book to list them all but suffice to say it's a great summary of the trials and tribulations of the retail industry, how it's being affected by the pandemic and more importantly, what it will look like post-pandemic. Doug discusses in detail how the leading brands have benefitted from Covid and what lies ahead for brands that rapidly accelerated their digital capabilities and are paying keen attention to the new customer experiences that will be required to keep consumers engaged in physical stores. I loved the discussion of what the shopping center of the future will look like. As a fund manager that dedicates to identifying the most relevant brands serving global consumers, Dougs expertise has paid serious dividends in helping me identify the brands that also should be great stocks. Doug states in the book that "brands are the new church and state". I could not agree more. The brand, its willingness to innovate and even self-disrupt in order to grow will matter even more into the future. We touched on the concept of a few brands being "Apex Predators" which gave me new things to think about as a stock picker. The retail industry has a lot of work to do in a post-pandemic world and Dougs insights through his book and his podcasts will be super important for CMO & C-suite conversations. The most relevant brands just "get it" and they will continue to survive and thrive at the expense of the others who simply do not. Bottom line: this book is entertaining, provocative, insightful, honest, and delivers on its mission to readers. It's the best book I have read in a very long time. This book is more than an examination of the retail industry, it shows the future of how we will all shop and what will drive our behavior and allows us to connect the dots back to some serious investment insights that can translate into future potential gains.

To learn more about Doug and his consultancy business: http://www.retailprophet.com

To buy Resurrecting Retail on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Resurrecting-Retail-Future-Business-Post-Pandemic/dp/1773271431/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=resurrecting+retail&qid=1621052234&sr=8-2

For more information on investing in Mega Brands: https://www.globalbrandsmatter.com