Published 12. March 2015, by Antti Karjaluoto and Arto Makkonen
Are Nordic retail organizations becoming digital businesses or are they just applying digital veneer?
In September 2014, Tomas Nyström wrote about Breaking out of the comfort zone: it’s time for Nordic retailers to harness digitalisation to create unique customer experiences and solutions. In this article he stated that fierce competition from international e-commerce sites, as well as from global brands landing on local shores, forces Nordic retailers to move fast to understand what digitalisation means for their own operations. A high priority must be blending the digital and physical worlds to drive superior experiences for their customers – with the customer as the focal point.
Recently, we conducted additional analysis to see how far Nordics’ top retailers have progressed in their digital transformation. In order to measure the digital maturity of the Nordic retailers, we used the Digital Index model developed by Accenture to benchmark how far the top retail companies have progressed in their digital transformations. The progress of companies was measured against three success factors; Digital Strategy, Digital Servicing and Digital Enablement. These three areas are further defined by multiple sub-categories.
In our research we analysed in total 45 Nordic retailers across Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark by using a scale from 1 to 4 (1 lowest and 4 highest score). Our findings confirm the fact that it is really time for Nordic retailer to harness digitalisation, as in average Nordic retailers are far beyond the average scores across all the digital index dimension of the global top 30 retailers (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Nordic retailer's digital index scores compared to global top 30 retailers.
