insight, and story-doing with Miami Dolphins' Former CMO, Pri Shumate and Ometria's CSO, Djalal Lougouev
[RIA3] How AI fuel
Also available as audio
Flat revenue growth is now the success metric for holiday season planning, signaling a fundamental shift in how retailers should set targets and evaluate performance amid pricing uncertainty and inventory constraints.
Uneven inflation across retail categories makes aggregate sales forecasts obsolete; CMOs need category-level pricing and promotion strategies rather than relying on blanket sales targets or company-wide discount frameworks.
Tariff uncertainty is forcing earlier inventory commitment decisions, which constrains promotional flexibility—retailers must lock in purchase and pricing decisions before visibility into final tariff impacts, reducing the ability to time discounts strategically.
Conversation 92
That's hard in retail because what we're seeing now is different parts of retail inflating at different rates. So you can't use one number for the whole thing. And that's challenging. Paula So what do you mean, like instead of saying like we're gonna have 500 billion in sales, like what is ideal? Richard Well, in terms of ideal in this environment, I think as people were saying a couple of years ago, flat is the new up.
Richard Kestenbaum, “Flat Is the New Up”: Richard Kestenbaum on Retail’s Uncertain Holiday Season at [RIA3] How AI fuel
insight, and story-doing with Miami Dolphins' Former CMO, Pri Shumate and Ometria's CSO, Djalal Lougouev
OFFBounds Source · 92· [RIA3] How AI fuel
