Episode 155 – The Amazon effect with Natalie Berg and Miya Knights

Miya KnightsNatalie BergAmazon has revolutionised retail, and it’s showing no signs of stopping. To understand the Amazon effect, and consider what might be coming next, we need to analyse it through two lenses – retail strategy and technology. Which is why retail analyst Natalie Berg and technology journalist Miya Knights decided to combine their perspectives and co-author their new book Amazon: How the world’s most relentless retailer will continue to revolutionise commerce.

In this conversation we talk about the Amazon effect itself (always fascinating for a publisher!) and the future of retail, but also what it takes to collaborate on a book, the difficulty of writing about a moving target, and how to fit the writing alongside the day job.


LINKS:

NBK Retail: https://nbkretail.com/

Natalie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Natalie_Berg

Miya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miyaknights/

Miya on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mazzaknights

Alison on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bookstothesky

The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/

Sign up for the 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge wait list: https://alisonjones.leadpages.co/proposal-challenge/

Alison Jones:                        Hello, and welcome to the Extraordinary Business Book Club – I’m delighted to be here today with Natalie Berg and Miya Knights. Natalie is a retail analyst and founder of NBK Retail, which is a consultancy specialising in retail strategy and future trends. She’s got more than 15 years experience heading up research teams at world-leading analyst firm Planet Retail and Kantar, and she’s one of the top 30 global retail influences. She has produced research on hot industry topics including the conversions of physical and digital retail, the store of the future, frictionless commerce and much more exciting stuff.

                                                      Miya Knights has nearly 20 years’ experience as a journalist, editor and research director specialising in enterprise technology use in retail. She is Head of Industry Insight at Eagle Eye Solutions and also publisher of Retail Technology Magazine, and a formal global technology research director at Planet Retail and senior research analyst with IDC Retail Insights. And both of them are consistently ranked among the world’s top retail influences. They have together written a new book, Amazon: How the world’s most relentless retailer will continue to revolutionise commerce, which has just been published. So welcome to the show, Natalie and Miya.

Natalie Berg:                        Thank you for having us.

Miya Knights:                       Yes, thank you.

Alison Jones:                        Really, really good to have you here. And I have to say as a publisher, I found this book particularly interesting: Amazon is obviously a subject of perpetual fascination for publishers, books are where Amazon started and they completely dominate bookselling in a way that very few publishers think is completely healthy, but they’ve disrupted now pretty much every other vertical along the way as well. So it may have started with us, but it certainly didn’t end with books. And it was really interesting to read what’s basically is a forensic analysis of how it’s done it and where it’s going. I was particularly interested in what you said about their ambitions for the future. So, and I know it’s a long book, with lots of complicated stuff in it, it’s absolutely fascinating, and I’m asking you to do it justice in 30 seconds, which is really unfair, but just tell us what you see as the most significant direction for Amazon for the future. Can it continue to grow?

Natalie Berg:                        I’m afraid I don’t have a short answer, I will do my best.

Alison Jones:                        Yes, it’s alright.

Natalie Berg:                        But I would start out by saying you’re absolutely right. The book industry was the first sector to be disrupted, but it was never Amazon’s intention to be a bookstore, they want it to be the everything store. They wanted to offer a one-stop shop, offer shoppers just about anything they could imagine with a click of a button or a touch of a screen. And as Miya will be able to explain in more detail I think, it’s not just about what Amazon sells but how they sell it. So they recognise the importance of a frictionless experience. Things like, when you’re shopping online, things like navigation, user-generated reviews, one click, payment delivery, all the stuff that has just become the norm for us today when we shop online. But Amazon knew that shoppers would become addicted to the convenience that they could offer, if they combined that product assortment, that endless aisles, millions of products with the ability to have this stuff turn up on shoppers’ doorsteps the very next day.

                                                      And I think again, and Miya will probably go into more detail here, Amazon is very much a technology company at heart. They love a challenge, we say throughout the book that they have a relentless dissatisfaction with the status quo. They’re always looking to improve the customer experience and I think they’ve actually made the retail sector, it’s better as a result. They’ve stamped out complacency and they forced everyone to raise their game. And so when we see headlines thinking about the future now about Amazon moving into healthcare, home security, banking, it might seem misaligned with their core retail division, but I think we have to remember that these are sectors that are ripe for disruption.

                                                      And also Amazon has established a heck of a lot of trust with consumers, and I think there’s a real opportunity. So in summary, looking to the future, there’s a lot of sectors where there’s opportunity for growth, I think groceries is the biggest one, but also fashion, homeware, toys… Services will be a big growth opportunity for Amazon going forward, advertising Prime, their membership scheme, where there’s a lot of opportunity for international growth. And also Miya will be able to talk more around voice technology and what they’re doing on the tech side, but also on the physical retail side, whether or not Amazon can actually crack bricks and mortar retail, that’s going to be a big focus for the future.

Alison Jones:                        And obviously a place where they’re investing a lot of money at the moment as well. Yes, Fascinating.

Natalie Berg:                        Yes. Sorry I told you it wasn’t going to be a short answer.

Alison Jones:                        I understand.

Natalie Berg:                        I could boil this down into a concise answer…

Alison Jones:                        It’s a big pretty question…

Miya Knights:                       I mean from my perspective I completely agree. I love the fact that Natalie points out that Amazon’s kind of got us addicted to the convenience of online shopping and rapid delivery. And I think in terms of the future direction, as Natalie said, my area of specialty being technology, focusing in on a couple of those areas ripe for disruption, I think grocery and its alignment with physical retail, and what we’ve seen with Amazon launching Amazon Go, the convenience store where you just walk out with your products, you don’t actually have to scan them or actually go through a checkout to pay for them, is really disruptive and is going to signal Amazon’s future direction. And it’s one of those really key examples where that disruption is going to have an absolutely seismic impact on the grocery sector particularly.

Alison Jones:                        Yes, of course, the acquisition of Whole Foods really shook up the sector, and it’s very clear that they’re going to be doing more there. Now that frictionless experience, I love it as a consumer, but it does make me stop and think and you draw attention to the issue of search as well and how they’ve … Amazon have a famously opaque algorithm that delivers really what they want to deliver rather than necessarily what you’re searching for, and I’ve experienced this quite a lot with books. And that allows them to, well, essentially when you look for something, they own both the means of delivering the results and the products that they’re selling and the advertising that means that the other products can be placed.

                                                      So I just think that’s really interesting isn’t it? Unadvertised products that aren’t Amazon’s I think are getting increasingly invisible. You can search an exact title of the book on Amazon, but often the exact match doesn’t even come up on the first screen of results, which is interesting. What do you think that means for brands? What does it mean for the customer experience on Amazon? Can their being frictionless go so far that it actually stops serving the customer?

Miya Knights:                       So I think I’ll take this one because we’re talking about opaque algorithms and tech has been my area in terms of dealing with the issues we bring up in the book. And definitely, we talk about how Amazon has been so disruptive with search just by the very virtue that you can search amongst hundreds of thousands of products, because as Natalie said it’s the everything store. And you raise some really interesting and correct points there about the fact that it’s not really a completely level playing field when you’re dealing with Amazon in the sense that they own the advertising there in the marketplace. They consider that other sellers facilitate … Let me start that again. They own the ad system there in the marketplace. They even own the fulfilment capabilities that merchants use to not only sell but deliver the products to us. As well as the fact, as you say Alison, that they are also increasingly make their own goods.

                                                      So one of the things that was Natalie and mine’s daily bread and butter was advising big brands and retailers on how they can both work with Amazon, but also making sure that they have a strategy to effectively compete with Amazon as well. For want of a better term that’s evolved, the term is coopetition, so in that sense, competing with Amazon through other channels, but maybe also accepting that because it is such massive marketplace, with such a huge target audience of customers that they can’t afford not to sell on it as well. But there are certain techniques that can be used in regards to search particularly just as we think about the way that retailers and brands will optimise their search terms for Google for example, there are ways that retailers and brands, and even independent merchants selling on Amazon, can work with Amazon to optimise their search.

                                                      It might have something to do with using their ads platform as well, so another example is how they… whether or not you co-locate your inventory, and so make the inventory much more accessible to Amazon and its own warehouse for it to get it to you more quickly. So it’s perhaps more likely to be listed as a Prime product, for example. So there are huge numbers of permutations and it is I think in reflection to use of the word opaque because it’s so complex. It can seem very opaque but for people who have been doing this online since the last 20 years, since online shopping has become popular I think it’s just another layer of complexity, but it’s more of the same in that sense. I think the other point though to make is that in doing this, I feel strategically Amazon has left some headroom from a search perspective for other retailers and brands to try and generally use some of the standards of the Amazon has set in terms of reviews and ratings as Natalie suggested.

                                                      But also perhaps to think about more targeted search, easier ways of searching, browsing and discovering products. Because being the everything store, the search inevitably returns thousands of thousands of results, which you then have to be kind of the human search engine or human filter to get down to what you want or not. I think we described that as one of the things that Amazon can’t do in terms of tightly curated targeted merchandising. And so that advantage of being strategically so important and essential to search can also work against it in terms of those products where people maybe are looking for something a little bit more specialist.

Alison Jones:                        Yes, It’s interesting. Do you see any evidence of anybody taking up that opportunity?

Miya Knights:                       I’ll definitely turn it over to Natalie here because she’s the one actually looking at what retailers are doing in terms of what Amazon can’t do. Any thoughts there Nat?

Natalie Berg:                        Yes, I think it raises an interesting point. And one of the very first things that I wanted to achieve with this book is to explore this phrase, ‘the Amazon effect’, because this often has a negative connotation. When we think of the Amazon effect, we tend to think of store closures, retail bankruptcies, job losses, and history is going through unprecedented levels of change, there’s a huge amount of structural change, and we really wanted to explore whether or not it was all Amazon’s fault. In a nutshell – again there’s about three chapters worth of information here that I’ll try to distil – but in a nutshell, yes, we are shopping more online and naturally we need fewer stores. This isn’t rocket science, this is just about following the customer. And so unfortunately there will be more short-term pain, as retailers adjust to the new reality, the new normal, the fact that in the UK, nearly 20% of retail sales take place online, so we don’t need as much physical space as we used to.

                                                      So I think that what we’re seeing across the sector is that retailers are now looking to either keep up with Amazon or distance themselves from them. And so as we think about the Amazon effect, I mentioned earlier that they’ve been a force for good and that they’ve stamped out complacency all to the benefit of the customer, because everyone has had to raise their game. And I think if we think about what the Amazon effect really is, if you look at the UK retail sector for example, it’s Tesco rolling out same-day delivery nationwide. It’s M&S trialling scan-and-go technology, allowing shoppers to skip checkout queues, because we know that, Miya mentioned Amazon Go earlier, they’re likely to open these checkout-free stores in the UK this year. So all the grocers are preparing for what could be quite a huge shift in how we shop generally.

                                                      But it’s also Waitrose delivering groceries directly into your fridge. It’s being able to ask Ocado to add eggs to your basket via Alexa, it’s ASOS letting shoppers try before they buy. I mean, there’s countless examples of retailers that have really improved their service and their offering to customers as a result. But to your original question, your original point around distancing themselves from Amazon and how retailers can focus on, as Miya said, what Amazon can’t do, well, what Amazon can’t do is service, it’s experience, it’s curation, it’s tapping into the local community. And particularly if you look at what’s happening with department stores today, I find it fascinating, there’s all kinds of really weird and wonderful experimentation happening where you’ve got Debenhams putting Jim’s Beauty Bars in their stores, you’ve got John Lewis sending their staff to theatre training so they can provide better service for customers, you’ve got them offering, John Lewis as well, offering personal shopping to everyone in store. So they’ve really democratised the service and made it available to their wider shopper based. Next as well, putting hair salons and Prosecco bars in their shops. So I think retail, not to say it, this isn’t to say that, the future of retail is Jim’s and Prosecco bars but I think that for those retailers that have a lot of excess space at a time when shopping spending rather is shifting online, I think they’re right to focus on more than just product, focus on providing an experience that just cannot be replicated online.

Alison Jones:                        That’s so interesting and Natalie makes the point as well that the Amazon innovation, that relentless innovation for which they’re so famous, I have to say, again coming back to the book industry, they single-handedly created the digital book infrastructure really, so they have an incredible impact on the bigger picture. So Natalie that’s a good point, a good counterpoint to the negative stuff. I want to move on now to talk about the writing because this is something that we obviously really focus on in this podcast, it’s very much what’s going under the hood? How did you write the book? How does it work for you? All that kind of stuff. And I’m always particularly interested when I get two authors who’ve written together because there are all shades of the spectrum of how this happens. So just tell us a little bit about how you actually went about dividing the writing work between you, the research work. How did you collaborate, what worked, what didn’t?

Miya Knights:                       I’ll start off with this one because I certainly think Natalie has a really interesting story to tell in terms of the way we came to actually write the book in terms of Amazon coming up as a subject matter. Because I know Natalie can explain how she’s had experience in the past looking at the world’s most disruptive retailers and writing books about them. And to Natalie’s credit in that sense, when she was asked to write a book about Amazon by the publisher Kogan Page, she came to me and suggested that perhaps I could help her fill in some of the technical detail or the technology-led detail. I think this goes back to the point she made at the beginning of our chat about the fact that we talk a lot about Amazon as a technology company first and a retailer second. I also always highlight the fact that Amazon has really disrupted the industry that it’s entered because it’s focused more on how it sells rather than what it sells.

                                                      I think that picks up on Natalie’s advice as a result of our research to other retailers to focus more on than just product. But in terms of the writing process, it then meant if Natalie was looking at the business of Amazon, the operating model, and I was looking at the technology innovation as an enabler, that the division of duties quite naturally fell into place. And I think it’s worked out sort of about 60-40% in that sense, and I think that balances on the whole, on reflection, in terms of what I’ve learned about Amazon through writing the book, right, that we’re looking about 60% of how Amazon is doing, what it’s doing, from an operating model perspective and a business perspective so that other businesses can understand how to learn from that disruption or stand apart from it, and 40% of it is how it’s done it, and I think that’s a reflection of our own voracious adoption of technology and the fact that we are all very much more digitally enabled as consumers nowadays. So that 60/40 division worked really well. I don’t know, Natalie, if you want to talk about how we started on this journey as well.

                                                      Well, I think Miya and I worked really well together because our skills were very much complementary, and as Miya said, Amazon is a technology company first and retailer second. And Miya is a technology analyst and I’m a retail analyst. So from that point of view…

Alison Jones:                        It’s like Amazon in microcosm.

Natalie Berg:                        It is, exactly. Well, as this was a book about Amazon, I knew that I needed to bring in Miya’s tech expertise because as we’ve said throughout the podcast, Amazon is a tech company first, retailer second. And I talk about technology in my day job from the point of view of how it impacts the customer experience, but I couldn’t have written chapters around robotics and drones and artificial intelligence. So that’s where Miya came in and really brought that deep industry knowledge. And also really, I think what was really important was as Amazon moves further into new sectors like grocery for example, what they want to do in grocery is take the chore out of shopping and they’ll do that through tech.

                                                      So technology really fed throughout the book. And I think it actually meant that Miya and I were able to work fairly independently, obviously there was a lot of collaboration throughout. But the chapter divides were pretty straightforward in that Maya would take on the frictionless retail side of things when it comes to AI and checkout free stores. And I focused more on the strategy, the impact on the history and how retailers can respond, how they can coexist with Amazon. So I think it was quite a natural fit and Miya and I have worked together in the past and worked quite well together. So I think that, yes, it was quite a natural fit and in overall it worked well. I’d say the only thing that was a struggle at times was, first of all there’s news about Amazon almost every day, it’s relentless.

Alison Jones:                        So relentless is the word that keeps coming up?

Natalie Berg:                        It does, completely. So that, the first question we got asked whenever we told people we’re writing at the manuscript about Amazon was how on earth are you going to keep up to date? And surely it’s going to be out of date before it’s even published, and of course it is, but that is the nature of Amazon. And I think there’s now a lot of opportunities to continue the conversation. And I suppose the only other challenge was just struggling to balance everything because Miya and I have day jobs, I started my own business early last year, so I was trying to balance getting a new business off the ground and writing.

Alison Jones:                        Actually this is the reality, I think this is the reality for most business book writers isn’t it? I mean, we’re not full-time writers, we’re doing the day job. And this is something we come back to again and again on the podcast – how you lock it into the work that you’re doing and make it work for you within the business, because otherwise, if it’s a side project it’s just not going to get done, isn’t it?

Miya Knights:                       Yes. I think I was going to add, just in terms of a little bit of detail on the collaboration process, it took about eight months didn’t it, it was the inevitable like crazy rush at the end and Natalie chasing me for chapters. But we had like maybe three or four initial meetings where we … And really it was the title of chapters planning stage that locked down that division of duties that we’ve both referred to, and then we went away as Natalie said and started writing our respective chapters and constantly swapping them with each other to make sure we were aligned. But as we’d worked together before, a lot of the themes we agreed on quite easily and quite naturally, so those themes kept getting repeated quite consistently, in fact, we had to work really hard to make sure we weren’t repeating ourselves. I think that was one of the process things that I would probably point to that if you’re working collaboratively, in that sense, you have to be laser focused on me mentioning something in one context that I think is significant, and then Natalie maybe mentioning that event again, like the launch of Prime or something, and just making sure that we’re not doing it in a repetitive way. But to the point ,Alison, you raised, the last point you raised about balancing it with the day job, my advice really is right about what you know, I think the fact that we’d been writing about this consulting with retailers, about this talking, about the effects of the online shopping on the high street, on the Amazon effect for, gosh, 15 or so years each, just made it easy in that sense to just get it all out of our heads and onto paper. Perhaps when you’re trying to write something that’s abstract to your day job, it becomes a little bit harder. I don’t know if that adds any more colour to your question.

Alison Jones:                        Yes, absolutely. I think it is really crucial: if you’re writing something that actually isn’t locked into to what you’re doing or where you’re going in the business, maybe it can be a little bit ahead, so the research is taking you there, you’re pulling yourself into directions, aren’t you? Which is really hard. It’s dividing your time rather than multiplying the effect of it.

Miya Knights:                       Absolutely. But Kudos to Natalie, to the point about the book being out of date because it’s a retail and technology based book I think, Natalie am I right that we started writing this just before the Whole Foods acquisition was announced and it just…

Natalie Berg:                        We pitched the idea before Whole Foods was announced.

Miya Knights:                       Yes.

Natalie Berg:                        Sorry to interrupt but just because we recognise that Amazon was moving more into bricks and mortar and moving more into grocery, but this was all pre Whole Foods. So when whole foods actually happen, I think Kogan page we’re very keen to get the book.

Miya Knights:                       Yes, it was great timing.

Natalie Berg:                        So we suddenly had a lot of material…

Alison Jones:                        It’s so interesting, when you’re doing something so topical, the publisher on the one hand is going, yes, we’ve got a really topical book, on the other hand they’re going: please can we just pause everything happening while we get this book out? It can be-

Natalie Berg:                        Absolutely.

Alison Jones:                        Fantastic that’s so funny. Thank you because it’s really interesting for people to hear how you work these things through, it’s the stuff that nobody talks about. They just say, I’ve written a book, but you want to know more about that, especially when you’ve written with someone else. But let’s just talk a little bit about the impact of the book now. I mean, did you have a sense of what you wanted it to achieve in the world? And you sound like you’re pretty clear about exactly what you were going to cover when you sat down, but what has the writing process and the publication process meant to you both personally and professionally?

Natalie Berg:                        Well, the book meant a lot to me because I had written one book before, a book about Walmart. It was co-authored with Brian Roberts, who’s another retail analysts, and this was published in 2012. It was when I was working full time, it was before I had kids. Before the social media distractions that we have today. And I suddenly, I came back to work after my second maternity leave, and for me, two things were very clear. I knew I was ready for a new challenge and I had been wanting to make that leap and set up my own business, but also a lot had changed in retail in that year. And I quickly realised that it was Amazon, if you have to single out one retailer, it really is Amazon who’s driving a lot of these changes. But at the same time as I mentioned, also recognise that Amazon was reaching its own inflexion point and that online only was really no longer enough for them and they’re having to suddenly look into opening physical stores at a time when all we hear about is death of the history and store closures.

                                                      So that was quite an interesting trend and also whether or not they could move into grocery, and this is quite a big shift for them. And because if Amazon can move into grocery, what’s different about grocery? Not only is it important because we all need to eat, it’s one of the biggest parts of consumer spending, but it’s a habitual purchase and it’s a high frequency purchase. And so if Amazon can suddenly reach shoppers every week, that means they’re more likely to make Amazon their default shopping option for everything else. So that’s why it’s moving to grocery, it’s been really interesting and it’s also been really quite a wake up call for the rest of the sector, not just the supermarkets but for all of retail.

                                                      So that was kind of the backdrop as to why I thought it would be really interesting to write the book and explore their strategy, and as I said, dispel some of those myths around the so called retail apocalypse that we’re facing. And the fact that Amazon is killing retail, I mean, I will keep saying that, I don’t think they’re killing retail, I think they’re killing mediocre retail. So as we’ve mentioned throughout the podcast, that really was a key theme. And there were some fantastic books already written about them in the past, The Everything Store by Brad Stone is definitely a book I would recommend. But past books have tended to focus on culture and leadership, and we really wanted to explore Amazon’s impact. We wanted to explore their strategy and sort of unpick how they’ve grown to become the most valuable listed company in the world, but also the impact and how we think, especially using Miya’s technology expertise, how we think that they’ll shape the future of retail and how physical retail stores will have to evolve.

                                                      So we’ve got two chapters on the store of the future. So that’s something that Maya and I are doing in our day jobs, so we really wanted to share that knowledge and how we’re advising retailers and sort of a day to day basis. So that’s kind of the background of why we decided to write the book, and I think it was very clear right from the beginning, some of the key themes as Miya said, that we really wanted to get across in the manuscript.

Miya Knights:                       Yes. I think Natalie’s absolutely right. I mean in terms of writing a book and what it meant to me personally, it’s my first book whereas Natalie has written a book before. I definitely felt this is a great way of doing a book in terms of one, doing it with somebody who’s got a track record but two, collaborate, coauthoring, sharing that burden. My background is that I did an English degree at university. I did always wanted to be a writer but reading and writing isn’t actually the most lucrative professional.

Alison Jones:                        Sad but true.

Miya Knights:                       Yes, unless you channel it in a particular way. And so I ended up, as I said, I think you said at the top, jumping into journalism, specialising in technology and further specialising in its use in retail from there. So it really was a culmination of an ambition to one day write a book. Meeting up with the advice I gave earlier about writing what you know, and having an opportunity to do that, so I grabbed it from a personal perspective and I think it really fed naturally into what, as Natalie’s already said, we’ve been doing professionally. The only other point I’d make about in terms of what I wanted it to achieve in the world, I don’t know that I actually thought it would achieve anything, I’ve actually been very nervous as it’s come out.

                                                      And everyone keeps saying to me, well, there’s no point in being nervous, there’s nothing you can do about it. And maybe that’s just me, but the fact that I have no control over how it’s reviewed or received makes me nervous, whereas I felt quite confident about writing it. So I don’t know if anything in terms of its achievements in the world, I think Natalie encapsulated it by saying, rather than writing a book about Amazon, we really wanted to write a book that not only dissected Amazon but the Amazon effect, so that retailers and brands and other merchants could learn from what Amazon is doing, as well as understand how their role can play into the world that Amazon’s created for us today.

Alison Jones:                        I love that point you make about the odd nervousness associated with the book, everybody feels it. When you do this stuff day in, day out and you talk about it all the time, why on earth would you be nervous about how it… but somehow it’s different, isn’t it? So I’m glad you said that because I think a lot of people will recognise that and will be grateful to you for making them feel less alone. So thank you. Now we are running out of time, but I wanted to ask you both, could you recommend a business book? Maybe let’s just keep it to one because we are getting shorter time, that everybody listening to this podcast should go and read because it’s so transformative, no pressure.

Miya Knights:                       Nope. I mean, I’ll go quick. I think Natalie’s already mentioned in terms of, excuse me, the themes that we’ve explored in our book, The Everything Store by Brad Stone is a great precursor for that, if you want sort of expand your knowledge on the topics that we’ve been discussing. But in terms of just business management books, I racked my brains and can’t think of anything recent, but I would recommend the book by Terry Leahy written a few years ago called Management in 10 Words. I really like his writing style, I’ve been lucky enough to work with him quite recently and just think, yes in terms of building and what we’ve learned about the leadership capabilities within Amazon and how that has had such a pivotal role in it’s success, in terms of, that made me think a lot about the themes that I also read about in that particular book as well.

Alison Jones:                        Brilliant. And I don’t know that book, so thank you, always really, really good to get suggestion when I don’t know, I will look that up. And I hope you noticed everybody, the first book that they cited there was actually what you could call a competitor, and I think this is really important because you can get hung up on the space, oh well, I’d love to write a business book but there’s so many in this space, but actually it’s all a conversation, isn’t it? You’re adding to, you’re building on, just because there are books out there, don’t be disheartened, don’t be dissuaded from writing around because actually it’s a good sign. It means that people are interested in this and that publishers are publishing it. So yes, just an interesting publishing point there, thank you both. Now people want to find out more about you, more about the book. Where should they go?

Natalie Berg:                        Well, I’m on all social channels. So LinkedIn, Twitter, and my website is NBRretail.com.

Alison Jones:                        Brilliant. And Miya?

Miya Knights:                       Linkedin for me – just do a search for Miya Knights. You could look for me under retailtechnology.com.uk as well.

Alison Jones:                        Brilliant. Well, I think we can do better than that. I will search you out and we’ll put up links on the podcast show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com. So if anybody does want to connect with you, they can do that. But thank you both. Fantastic interview, that was such an interesting subject. Thank you so much for your time.

Miya Knights:                       Thank you Alison.

Natalie Berg:                        Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

 

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