Tomorrow, 22 September, the first ever SPAR Connected Retail Conference, merging the previously held LOGIT and Marketing Conferences, kicks off with over 600 participants from more than 40 SPAR partners worldwide. Not only will it be the 1st edition of this conference, but this year will be especially unique as the event will be a fully virtual conference.

The SPAR Connected Retail Conference will take place on 22, 23 and 24 September from 9am to 12pm CET (Amsterdam time). The conference will be fully virtual, focusing on sharing best practice, innovation and learning with colleagues across the SPAR network in the areas of Marketing, IT & Technology, Supply Chain & Logistics.

The exciting world of grocery retail is ever changing. Driven by data and technology, the entire value chain is becoming more customer centric. This means that within SPAR we are seeing a blurring of Marketing, IT and Logistics disciplines amongst others. Marketing is becoming more data driven and digitally enabled, IT back-end is becoming more directly customer focused and integrated with front-end, whilst logistics and supply chain are becoming more end to end, with a stronger focus on fulfilling the customer proposition. In essence, the demand (Marketing) is increasingly intertwined with the fulfilment (Logistics), enabled by data and technology (IT).

Bringing these topics together in the Connected Retail Conference will facilitate the sharing of best practice between these disciplines further in 2020.