Life after HMV - a trip down the high street 2020

I recently blogged about the demise of HMV from my perspective of handling their advertising account for over twenty years but with the collapse of so many long established retailers, many of which played a vital role in the cultural fabric of British Society, I've started wondering what the high street is going to look like in the future?

I think it's worth saying, before we all get too excited about the rescue plans for HMV, I see it as little more than a stay of execution in which those who seek to salvage it can make a fast buck, as no doubt with the right cuts and cost structure there is money to be made in the short term . 

The inevitable and sad denouement for HMV is closure, as everything it sells will ultimately be bought online and if you need any proof, just try asking anyone under 30 the last time they bought a CD or DVD? 

Before Christmas last year, I wrote a piece on 'showrooming', the phenomenon where people use bricks and mortar stores to browse but look up prices on their smartphone (often using a bar code scanner app like Amazon's) and buy elsewhere online, usually before they've even left the store.  ITN saw the blog and asked me to appear in a news piece on it and ironically the store they chose to do the interview was HMV (before its demise). 

As I stood there in HMV Oxford Street, hanging around for about an hour whilst they set up to film, I really began to notice the average age of the HMV customer was in fact middle-aged. And therin lies the certain future for HMV - namely they haven't got one because there are no younger customers following on behind.

I often hear so called 'retail experts' say, "The store experience is all wrong, they need to make the 'store theatre' more engaging to attract customers." In fact in recent weeks I've heard many of them say it about HMV but I'm afraid this is nonsense - the store experience may well make the store more appealing but it won't affect the fact when I'm in there I can buy the identical product for half the price online or that I actually don't need to go in the store because I can download it. In fact all it does is make your 'showrooming' experience more enjoyable. The other one so called 'retail experts' come out with is the expertise and helpfulness of staff can make all the difference but one only has to take Jessops as an example to see this isn't going to overcome the seismic changes which are taking place in retail. By all accounts the expertise and helpfulness of Jessops' staff was second to none but regrettably all it did was make it an even more pleasurable 'showrooming' experience, allowing you to buy online elsewhere with greater confidence.

Retailers like HMV, Jessops, Comet and Waterstones provide (or provided) enormous benefit to online retailers like Amazon because it's somewhere people can browse and discover new products yet buy online. But what happens when they are all gone? Where do we do our showrooming then? Where do people go and see Rihanna make an appearance on the high street promoting her new album, as she did in HMV - ironically there were queues of young people out of the door but no one was there to buy. 

Does the future include Amazon and other online retailer showrooms? Or even record company showrooms where artists can make appearances? My feeling is that it probably does; however good Amazon's algorithms become in making recommendations to me, it's still not the same as browsing.

So what is a stroll down the High Street going to look like in 2020?

Well, I was recently in one large town in the Midlands where it seemed to be nothing but bookmakers and cheap booze shops - it presented a very ugly and depressing scene and I certainly didn't want to dawdle. Is this the future for our high street?  I hope not. The growth of huge out of town supermarkets in the 80's and 90's has largely done for the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker but what else will survive in the high street? Booze and betting?

'Shopping is the new religion' is a well worn aphorism and standing not in the high street but in the Westfield Shopping Center in White City last Sunday, it certainly seemed true to me - it was packed with people worshiping at the altar of materialism in a cathedral of retail (not necessarily a bad thing in my book). I looked at the crowds of people, who were predominantly young and asked myself why they were there? 

And my answer is this -  in the same way kids would spend a Saturday hanging around HMV in the high street twenty years ago, this is where they are now. And what retail outlets dominate Westfield?  The answer is fashion and food - yes of course fashion is done online but nothing compares with trying-on and fashion products aren't easily comparable by showrooming, they are unique to Top Shop, or Zara and they've yet to get round to inventing online eating and drinking.

A whole generation is about to grow up not experiencing the high street as I did, so they're not going to feel they are missing out on anything, especially HMV. The cultural, social experience is now achieved in the darkness of Abercrombie & Fitch followed by Snog for frozen yoghurt. 

If the high street is still going to be around in 2020 (and I have no crystal ball) I think it will largely be devoid of any shops which sell easily price comparable mass-produced products.  If you are able to find anything at all, it will be two things: stuff that you can put in your body and stuff that you can wear on your body.

And an awful lot of betting shops, unless the government does something about it of course.


Also see:


http://www.philipbeeching.com/2013/03/can-companies-like-hmv-reinvent.html