Tech & Retail Wars in 2013

The battle for retail dollars is set to be fiercer than ever in 2013. Will your tech keep you on top of the game or see you become a victim in the next twelve months?

Reports put the 2012 holiday sales season as the worst on record since 2008, despite deep discounts and offers beginning even before Black Friday. If this trend continues into the New Year, then only the strong will survive.

This will be a year when only the consumer friendly brands hold out, those mastering technology to lower overhead and widen profit margins stay in the business, and the organizations that stand out the most will thrive, grow, and be able to dominate on the downfall of their less well-equipped competition.

With stories of even Mark Zuckerberg’s sister publicly complaining on Twitter about the lack of photo sharing privacy on Facebook, social networks have a lot of work to do to retain users and marketers ahead.

Apple has announced a new iPad 5 to be released in March. This will certainly rub many who forked out for iPads for Christmas the wrong way and will be followed by more time in the courts as tech giants use every weapon in their arsenals to fend off the competition.

However, perhaps most significant was the Netflix flop on Christmas Eve which left consumers on two continents unable to use the service on two of its busiest days of the year. Netflix blames Amazon Web Services, signaling that retailers must make themselves less reliant on third parties in 2013 and have a strong offline alternative for marketing and communications if they want to retain market share in the year ahead.

This, plus as competition for dollars heats up, with potentially fewer dollars to chase, those with prime toll free vanity and business phone numbers will be those who lead in 2013. Do you have yours yet?