Health Hearth Personal Services Webs Will Transform $1-Plus Trillion Food, Drug, and Nutritional Industries, According to New IDC PlanScape

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05 Aug 2015

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., August 5, 2015 – Technology is fundamentally changing the domains of our personal lives and our means of living, setting the context in which retailers and manufacturers are challenged to differentiate themselves well enough to earn their shoppers' business. Consumer personal technologies and enterprise systems of engagement create "personal services webs" within which consumers define their needs and set their expectations and retailers and other B2C businesses establish their unique selling proposition and generate revenue and margins.

According to a new IDC Retail Insights study, IDC PlanScape: Health Hearth Personal Service Webs—Transforming Lives and Industries (Doc #258015) , ecosystems of on-line services, apps, devices, and software will within five years radically transform how 110 million U.S. households manage their $8500 annual grocery budgets and streamline hundreds of hours handling onerous, time-consuming, mistake-prone, and hard to coordinate chores.

"Health hearth personal services webs stand ready to transform the basis of competition and industry structure of food and related retailing, manufacturers' approach to channel and trade fund management, health insurance, wellness and lifestyle publication, and personal technologies," said Greg Girard, Program Director, IDC Retail Insights.

"Companies taking leadership positions defining health hearth personal services webs will gain the opportunity to out-uber Uber," he continued. "Think about it, Uber changes how you use a taxi. Here, companies can help their customers pare down their monthly grocery expenses, save time and effort on shopping chores, and care for themselves and their loved ones day in and day out. What's more, these companies will increase their revenues and reduce their own costs and risk."

The IDC PlanScape methodology helps IT professionals plan the transformation of their business to adopt a Health Hearth Personal Services Web. It provides a business case, identifies risk factors, and outlines critical success factors.

Figure 1

C-level retail executives should start readying their companies now to compete with a personal services web strategy. IDC Retail Insights offers the following guidance to these executives:

• CEO: Champion new commercial, content, data, and analytics relationships with CPG partners and beyond with insurers and pharmacy benefits managers to create new shopper incentives
• CMO: Define value in terms of daily life outcomes beyond product quality and price, shopping convenience, and assortment, and create new relationships with lifestyle and well-being publishers
• Chief Merchant: Change the error-prone, primitive "comp shop" and pricing processes with big data and analytics to outsmart competitors with predictive analytics
• CIO: Lead system, process, analytics, and data strategies for algorithmic shopping markets and new monetizable information flows
• Chief Omni-Channel Officer: Extend customer engagement deep into home online-services, apps, content, and devices

Health hearth personal services webs emphasize the critical importance of managing information and content flows to differentiate any retailer from its competitors. Information management and content distribution are core Google and Amazon competencies. This makes them transformational agents and threats as retail competition turns on health hearth personal services webs.

To arrange a one-on-one briefing with Greg Girard, please contact Sarah Murray at 781-378-2674 or sarah@attunecommunications.com. Reports are available to qualified members of the media. For information on purchasing reports, contact insights@idc.com; reporters should email sarah@attunecommunications.com.