What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Tariffs, Tech, and Transformations: A Retail Reality Check
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Retail is in an age of perpetual reinvention. From navigating online strategies in the early 2000s to mobile adoption in the mid-2000s and now grappling with tariffs and supply chain disruptions, retailers must continuously evolve to survive and thrive. According to Dominick Miserandino, CEO of Retail Tech Media Nexus, the fundamental truth remains constant amid this change: "You are selling an emotion, the emotion of that thing."
Dominick brings a unique perspective to retail, having transitioned from mainstream media to mentoring over 200 e-commerce startups before creating his current venture connecting tech companies, retailers, and media partners. His insights reveal a fascinating dichotomy in today's retail landscape. While giants like Amazon, Walmart, and Apple leverage their vast resources to create seamless digital experiences, nimble small businesses find success through authentic personal connections – like the retailer who phoned every customer to thank them, inadvertently creating a viral marketing strategy that cost nothing but time.
The conversation explores how retailers are adapting to economic challenges, particularly the impact of tariffs on supply chains. For some small businesses with tight margins, these disruptions represent an existential threat: "I do not have the margin. I cannot cover these tariffs in any way. Period, I'm dead." Yet others find ways to innovate through efficiency, implementing solutions like virtual shopping experiences that reduce costs while enhancing customer convenience.
As digital transformation continues reshaping retail, Dominick cautions against getting caught in technology hype cycles without clear implementation strategies. Many retailers collect vast amounts of data without effectively analyzing it, while others struggle to balance personalization with authenticity. "We personalize to the point of almost numbness," he notes, suggesting that consumers increasingly value genuine connections over algorithmic recommendations.
Connect with Dominick on LinkedIn, where he maintains over 30,000 professional connections, to learn more about navigating retail's ever-changing landscape and to discover how businesses of all sizes can build meaningful customer relationships in an increasingly digital world.
An Acxiom podcast where we discuss marketing made better, bringing you real...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody. It's not often you get a legend on the show here, and we have one today, dominic the king of retail, as I call him. How are you, sir?
Speaker 2:Thank you, sir. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Doing great. We've known each other in passing on social for over a decade. Love your content and the work that you do. Before that, just how do you introduce yourself these days to your followers, fans, clients and beyond?
Speaker 2:Sometimes just Dominic, other times Dominic Miserandino, CEO of Retail Tech Media Nexus.
Speaker 1:Well, that's all. You said it all, so you know. Talk about your bio and background. It's so interesting your journey into the media retail empire that you built over the last decades.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I definitely appreciate that and appreciate being on. I was born more out of media. I was in mainstream media. At that time I was on the other side of the retail mirror. I was getting pitched all the time on that side of the mirror would you like to review my AirPod? Would you like to tell us how you love it and whatnot? And then I realized I cared more about how those sales occurred. I started mentoring startups, probably worked with over 200-plus e-commerce startups. Literally I got bored through COVID and then after that I got into the retail the media side of it, created this Retail Tech Media Nexus where we're basically connecting tech companies and retailers and media companies together. It's a little triangle there Love it.
Speaker 1:And, you know, give us a snapshot of the retail market as you see it. Best of times, worst of times? Obviously somewhere in between. But where are we? In your humble opinion?
Speaker 2:Reinvention, reinvention, reinvention. That's been the theme to me for the past two decades. Phone calls I had in the early 2000s were how do we handle going online? Mid-2000s, how do we handle mobile? And now, how do we handle tariffs? I've been on TV about tariffs twice, three times a week for the past few weeks. It's been insane, but that's it. You have to kind of constantly remember that one most important thing that you are selling an emotion, the emotion of that thing. Why do I love this thing in my hands, whatever it may be? And as long as you kind of reinvent to that, you're good. Yeah, and I think guys like you and I kind of reinvent.
Speaker 1:To that you're good, yeah, and I think guys like you and I are always reinventing themselves, coming through many incarnations and careers in tech and business. They call it digital transformation, which sounds very fancy, but it's basically, you know, the old brick and mortar guys trying, gals trying to digitize as. Has digital transformation worked? I mean outside of amazon and walmart? I mean, uh, has. Has it been a failure, do you think? Or?
Speaker 2:there's some bright lights I think there's tons of bright lights. I think that, uh, you could see the successes, the ones you've obviously mentioned. Uh, right now we're going through this mini. I think there's two transformations going on. You have the tire of transformation and the age of experience. I would call it, uh, everything's experiential now. It's connecting, it's a pop-ups and not certainly has soared much more than ever before, um, but, yeah, those who are doing a good job at it, certainly has soared much more than ever before. But, yeah, those who are doing a good job at it, hitting home runs, they're hitting home runs at it.
Speaker 1:And the home runs are largely. You know the companies many of us know and love, like Apple, the guys who have deep pockets, deep benches, it and tech talent galore, market cap cap. How's everyone else doing, except the big brands who are killing it out there in retail again, apple is one of my favorite examples, but we all can't be Apple, right, we all can't be Dominic. Let's say how's everyone else doing? The smaller retailers, the SMEs, the mid market, I think the smaller ones yeah, those smaller guys who understand what they're dealing with in that.
Speaker 2:um, there's one uh retailer I was advising and I asked her how many sales do you get a day? And it was 5, 10, 15 a. She had bigger price per unit and we got a call from every single customer. It stood out, everybody. She would say thank you for the purchase and who do you recommend? And it started going viral. She would just call while folding the laundry and I thought it was such an effective means of cutting through that noise of just. I'll just call you evan, thanks a lot for the buying my widget. I love that, you know, and I do think those are the techniques. Um, pop-ups, um, we are retail tech meeting access. We're doing an event pop-up for one client, like right in their town, and so you can do that pretty easily, you can connect, and so I think knowing of that size to be, nimble is amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one big buzzword I stole from one of your blogs is omni-channel. You talked about omni-channel strategy. Everything's converging, online, offline, different channels. What's next, though, when you cover every channel known to mankind, how do you ensure it's seamless and integrated and effective?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's a great question, because it's not always effective. It's not always effective. My business, linkedin is by far the best channel, but that doesn't mean the others are bad, nor good. Omnichannel, sometimes turn on everything is great, but I think it's a variant of turn on everything within your abilities and within your power and whatever's going to also give you that conversion event. You have to think is this going to do it? Like? You might have the ability I might have the ability to use Instagram as a channel, but maybe that's not going to convert it all for me.
Speaker 2:So, even though I might have the time, you have to kind of weigh all those when you're looking at Omnichannel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's very generation dependent too. I mean, my kids just refuse to make phone calls. You know 20-somethings and I think increasingly we're moving to a kind of hybrid world of messaging and apps. Where are the retailers investing these days in channels both, both advertising, customer engagement, customer support? Do you have any?
Speaker 2:you know a lot of the investment, I think in the past four months, has been in terms of um efficiency, you know um. There's one company I'm advising. They, for example, have a video experience right in store, so the consumer doesn't even have to go to the store. They can do it by video call. They can see their products Parlor retail, it's called and it cuts out a cost. It cuts out that cost for the consumer in terms of delivery I'm sorry going there it cuts out the cost in terms of labor and I think that those things are kicking in because we can't control the tariffs, we can't control supply chain right now. So if you can't control your operations, you have control over something at that point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well said, and you're outside of New York City. Point. Yeah, well said, and you're outside of New York City, I believe Long Island.
Speaker 2:Long Island yes.
Speaker 1:You know, I think New York City is still the media capital of the world, 100%. Do you think it's that in retail, retail tech, retail trends, do you think it's still the trendsetter? Because you know, I look around the world, you've got Shenzhen and Singapore and London and other places. I wonder if they're setting the trends for the future of retail. Where's New York City in the big picture of media?
Speaker 2:and retail. That is a dangerous question, you know. On the one hand there's always an event in New York City, there's always people in the field to meet in New York City. I get calls for dinners and events all the time and I could probably do one a week, fine. But then again, when you're talking innovation, I mean I've seen some cutting-edge stuff from all around the world, and that's especially in a post-COVID world. There is no centralized, as much you don't have to say let's meet up downtown Brooklyn and discuss X, y, z, you, you know, shenzhen, china, I mean China, there's so many people doing amazing cutting edge stuff. Like I was particularly thrown. I didn't expect it, I thought it was brilliant. It went during the initial, during the initial part of the tariffs. There was those factories in China going on TikTok, not necessarily innovative, but I thought, yeah, that was just jumping into action immediately and responding within 24 hours with a message and uniform, and I think you're seeing that a lot in various places around the world. Again, very cutting edge.
Speaker 1:Very cutting edge. Speaking of cutting edge, AI has hit the retail sector as hard and as fast as any. I saw Google IO this week. You'll now be able to make a darn good ad for peanuts using Google IO tools and create what was the 30-second spot. It may have taken weeks, months and tens of thousands of dollars. You can do for a few hundred bucks. That's just one example. How is AI hitting the retail space, with the decision makers that you speak with daily?
Speaker 2:You know, I find it interesting because I don't know if we're societally caught up to where AI is. If you told me even a photo generation, as good as it is, let alone this video generation, well beyond where I expect it to be and I don't think the use case is, you need to have people really push it, as we normally do, to say does this make sense, does that make sense? I don't know if we're there yet in terms of understanding. The tech is there, how are we going to use it? I feel like that's a different story.
Speaker 1:And you know that applies to the front office and the back office, like every vendor you talk with at you know, the big NRF show is data-driven decision-making and data analytics. And you go into a retailer and they're running on tech from the you know 70s or 80s and there seems a big disconnect between all of this advanced data tech, data science, automation, and what the retailer can consume and deploy and manage. I don't know if data scientists at scale, whether it's Amazon or Walmart or Apple, what have you? So how do you make use of this tech like data analytics or back office IT effectively, given their challenges.
Speaker 2:It's definitely an education. There's one company I use actually here in Long Island, five Element Analytics, and I'll spend more time learning than I will sometimes doing, and I think you know there's a lot to unpack when it comes to data science. And I think the challenge is also you your, I found retailers will throw everything up in the cloud and not even make sense of it. Hooray, they have it up there, but no one's looking at that. And then you have to really constantly think of what this means, uh, impact, how it impacts your business.
Speaker 1:Basically, that's a constant, constant question yeah, yeah and and uh, you know, not getting bought into the the vendor hype is is it is a challenge. They're spending gazillions on marketing it.
Speaker 2:It's easy to get caught up that vendor hype. If you stand at NRF and say, does anyone have a unified data solution, I mean 500 hands will raise at that point and that doesn't help anybody.
Speaker 1:Speaking of NRF, I mean it remains the powerhouse in the industry. It seems to get bigger every year. Is that just going to continue in perpetuity? Are there other events that you're focused on in retail retail tech and what do you think the future of big events like that is?
Speaker 2:I'm not sure, like I've been doing a lot with gds and middle alliance recently. Uh, for example, and um, sometimes I find it easier when there's less, and sometimes I find it easier when there's less crowd, less noise, you can sit down, you can have a conversation. But also there's so many specific ones. I just did a keynote at a conference called Deliver in the fall and it was just people in the delivery space and I just found it fascinating to get that uniform point of view and those people hyper focused on that one area, um, in the room, with enough of the crowd that you don't have to worry about uh, grabbing 30 seconds while you're on a line, like at a bigger conference. But I think each has its own place. Sometimes it's great to be able to give 58 high fives in 20 minutes that's true, you know and other times you just want to say, hey, can we just sit and have a coffee and actually handle that meeting here and now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, the power of intimacy. A lot of money continues to pour into customer experience CX for short and you really see the big tech leaders taking advantage of it. I mean, it's really amazing to shop from Apple or Amazon these days, but you know my average bank branch or pharmacy probably not so much. Yep, how are you seeing retailers leverage, you know all these amazing CX customer service, even contact center tools?
Speaker 2:enhanced customer experience. You know, one of the other questions along with that I'll get is CX and personalization. And I think at times my mindset, especially in personalization, has been changing, because we personalize to the point of almost numbness. You know everything is personalized and then you're like, okay, just like with AI. How often can you now tell when it's written by AI, just instinctually we get used to it and then we say maybe not, maybe too much here. We get used to it and then we say maybe not, maybe too much here. But also, the consumer has gotten used to things of a certain quality, a certain level, a certain ease. So there's a certain standard there. And I think, especially in retail, the constant reminder that you're serving the customer, ultimately, whatever that experience needs to be at that level, is vitally important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's, you know. You know what it feels right and it feels genuine and honest. It's a great feeling.
Speaker 2:Exactly. You can always tell right, genuine, honest. And I always, you know, strive and double check myself, even all the time. How can I make this better? How can I fix this better for myself?
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally. So I know you get this question asked a million times. You've been on, you know every network talking about tariffs. So you know, as we speak here, it's Friday, I'll push this out, probably next week. You know, as we speak here, it's Friday, I'll push this out, probably next week. We're back on punishing the EU, we're back on punishing Apple, but what's your take on how this might resolve? What scenario? Are you high, medium, low road? Are you behind at the moment on how the tariff story is going to play out over the next few months in?
Speaker 2:retail. That is a great question, because I think the challenge on the tariffs is more so the consistency, the supply chain consistency. You're seeing LA ports getting reduced chips coming in and I think every business needs, to some degree, to predict. Now, you can't always who knows what's going to happen next quarter, next month, next year, but the prediction, and I wonder at what point do we all say I just want to know what's happening. I want to know what's happening, I want to know for sure. And there, I think, is going to be before burnout in terms of the tariffs themselves, there's going to be a burnout in terms of being able to predict what's happening, and that's where we're going to hit people.
Speaker 1:It's going to hit people hard and I think the big Fortune 2000 can probably weather that. It's lots of ability to manage that. It's going to be harder for early-stage companies and startups and small retailers. You know you said you mentioned you mentored over 100 startups. What are startups saying to you about navigating this complexity and all these challenges, these?
Speaker 2:days. And how are they doing it in practicality? It's all practically supply chain, that's everything and they're all I know. One called me and she simply said I do not have the margin. I cannot cover these tariffs in any way. I have to cut down Period, I'm dead. I can't get it domestically. There is no chance. I have one contact. She used specifically artisans in Italy. Wow, it's like they don't exist here. There is no artisan in Italy. I cannot get this up to speed. I can't fly people here from Italy to train locals. It's just not going to happen. And her margin was so tight. But so I think it's so case by case. At that point, every case is a little bit different at that point.
Speaker 1:It is and I feel lucky. I'm in a business that you know doesn't produce any goods.
Speaker 2:Uh, just content uh speaking of we are the safest business in the world you know there's no, there's no tariff on content yet, so we'll tax.
Speaker 1:We'll see if that uh plays out. Uh. But what are you up to the next few weeks and months? What's on your mind? It's a little bit quieter over the summer in the industry. Maybe the events cool down. But what are you up to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know that's actually the big question in this entry. I've been looking possibly putting together a few things over the summer to keep things a little awake. I'm having a few conversations about that right now actually.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic, and tell us about your business. I mean, I'm a, you know. As you know, I'm a content creator, a TV host now on a show called Tech Impact, and I podcast and blog, and I think we'd call each other influencers of a sort, although we don't do the TikTok. How's business otherwise?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know it's funny. You say that because I agree it's become this new influencer world and that in turn, has created this business On the tech companies calling me saying Dominic, do you know so-and-so?
Speaker 2:I have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. I know so-and-so Whoever that so-and-so may be. So we've created two legs of it, if you will. One leg is connecting the tech to the retailers Do you know so-and-so? And then the other we have a leg for the B2B PR side PR tech companies trying to connect to the media. But you know, it's timing too. I think that's all we're looking for as people is just to connect, and I'm proud to make a business of who do you want to meet and how do you want to connect to them. And we make it happen.
Speaker 1:And I think it's nice to have a business that okay. Nominally, you call it an influencer, but it's not. We're not selling beauty products, obviously. We're not selling makeup and hair products, obviously. So there is an appetite for B2B content, which is really cool, and the fact that we both make a great living at it is a testament to what's possible on social 100%.
Speaker 2:I think you know we have social. We all want to connect essentially as humans. I think we learned that via COVID and we learn it now, and any opportunities we can make for that, the better.
Speaker 1:What channels are working best for you? I mean I find you know podcasting is really great. I mean I listen, you know podcasting is really great. I mean I listen to podcasts all day and apparently there's even for niche topics pick retail tech, but any other B2B topic is pretty niche. There's a great audience on podcasts. Itunes, spotify, youtube.
Speaker 2:You know, it's funny.
Speaker 1:But what other formats are working? Great for you.
Speaker 2:At times I meet people I will actually ask them that question in terms of communication, how do you want me to contact you? Linkedin message, whatsapp, text, phone, and I've had people say, instagram, and I think that's where we're evolving, where it's not necessarily the one I mean linkedin has been incredible. I'm thrilled, uh, having so many connections reach out. I probably get dozens minimal of messages a day, if not, usually about 100 plus, but that doesn't mean a better nor worse. It's almost, you know, like we said, omni-channel in terms of communication, in terms of media. Each of these channels, I think, is an active and valid communication. You just have to figure out what your audience wants and what works best for you and find that mutuality.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think brands need to think more expansively about their social reach. And you know, multi-channel, omni-channel, being in more places, being interesting, being fun, being funny like you are and not so straight-laced, which most brands can be pretty boring. So working with folks like yourself is a great way to liven up their content, their point of view, their perspective. I look forward to seeing you when I'm in the city next. I won't even hold the Celtics' loss to the Knicks against you, but I will look forward to breaking bread.
Speaker 2:So I look forward to seeing you soon. I love it, man. I'm looking forward to it too. We should definitely do that.
Speaker 1:And thanks everyone. Thanks for listening, watching, checking out my new TV show, techimpacttv, and until then, take care. Talk soon.