NEW YORK, Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Shoptalk, the world’s largest conference for retail and ecommerce, today released its final 2018 agenda. The event will be held on on March 18-21 at the Venetian in Las Vegas, and feature 300+ world-class speakers, including:

• Amazon – Eric Broussard, VP of International Marketplaces and Retail
• Boxed – Chieh Huang, Co-Founder & CEO
• Coach – Joshua Schulman, CEO & President
• Facebook – Carolyn Everson, VP, Global Marketing Solutions
• Google – Daniel Alegre, President, Retail & Shopping
• Houzz – Alon Cohen, President & Co-Founder
• Macy’s – Jeff Gennette, CEO
• Pinterest – Ben Silbermann, Co-Founder & CEO
• Target – Brian Cornell, CEO,
• Ulta Beauty – Mary Dillon, CEO
• Unilever – Gina Boswell, President, Customer Development

The agenda, which continues to lead the retail and ecommerce narrative, provides the most comprehensive learning and development opportunity for industry professionals, ensuring they are fully informed and able to contribute during a period of ongoing transformation.

Shoptalk’s 2018 agenda focuses on important, timely themes including The Retail Industry Shakeout, Experiential Retail, Private Label Strategies, Conversational Commerce, Artificial Intelligence, Advances in Payments and Checkout, and Innovations in Stores and the Supply Chain: Blockchain, IoT and Beyond. It also incorporates global perspectives on innovation from markets including Europe, China and Israel as well as a new program called Grocerytalk that specifically addresses the grocery and CPG industries.

New for 2018, Shoptalk’s agenda enhances its groundbreaking narrative with expanded speaker and session descriptions—crafted entirely in-house by the Shoptalk team—that help introduce the industry to new companies, explain why each speaker was selected and provide guidance on the sessions and topics that will be of greatest interest and relevance to each attendee. Shoptalk’s 2018 final agenda can be viewed at http://shoptalk.com/agenda.

With its third Las Vegas event, Shoptalk has once again compiled the industry’s most senior and diverse speaker lineup which is comprised of 45% CEOs, 25% other C-level officers and 20% VP-level executives. Additionally, 30% of Shoptalk speakers are women and 20% of speakers are from outside the US. A list of the 300+ confirmed speakers is available at http://shoptalk.com/speakers.

Shoptalk also released its very first official point of view on the retail industry’s evolution with the publication of “Shoptalk’s Framework for Retail”. In this piece, the Shoptalk team sets forth its hypothesis of three major stages of retail transformation:

• From a Legacy Normal that dominated retail for decades, where short-term wins were prioritized over longer-term investments and innovation was mostly incremental (2015 & Before).
• Through a period of Disruptive Change caused by the convergence of disorienting shifts in consumer behavior, technology and competition. This stage saw the correction of previous missteps and initial implementation of disruptive innovation (2016-2017).
• To a sustained New Normal where a critical mass of the industry embraces continuous, disruptive innovation to satisfy changing customer expectations in a digital age (2018 & Beyond).

Shoptalk’s Framework for Retail is available at  https://shoptalk.com/storage/docs/Shoptalk-Framework-for-Retail.pdf.

“In mid-2015, we accurately predicted that retail was about to undergo a long-term, multi-stage transformation. Our view was based on the industry reaching a tipping point of disruptive technologies and trends as well as the reckoning of past industry practices that focused almost exclusively on near-term gains,” said Anil D. Aggarwal, founder and chief executive officer of Shoptalk. “Ours was not a widely held view at the time, so we created Shoptalk to lead a new conversation and community with a mission to be a catalyst for the evolution of the retail and ecommerce ecosystem. We’re thrilled to continue our mission into 2018 with the best agenda and speaker lineup of any event globally, as the industry transitions to its New Normal stage.”

“The New Normal is the time when most–not just few–in the industry must educate and inform themselves about the retail and ecommerce trends and technologies that are fundamentally altering their businesses,” added Zia Daniell Wigder, Shoptalk’s Chief Global Content Officer. “We’re delighted to meet this critical industry need with our 2018 agenda.”

About Shoptalk
Shoptalk organizes the world’s most important events for retail and ecommerce innovation. Held in both the U.S. and Europe, Shoptalk events represent unprecedented gatherings of individuals and companies reshaping how consumers discover, shop and buy. Each event provides a platform for large retailers and branded manufacturers, startups, tech companies, investors, media and analysts to learn, collaborate and evolve. The next Shoptalk will be held from March 18-21, 2018 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. For more information, visit www.shoptalk.com. Follow @shoptalk. Like facebook.com/shoptalk. Get tickets for Shoptalk at: http://shoptalk.com/register.

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SOURCE Shoptalk