GPO Founder Brian Rutledge to Speak at Retailing Summit 2017

GPO President and Founder Brian Rutledge will speak at Retailing Summit 2017 on October 12 at the Westin Galleria in Dallas, Texas.

The Retailing Summit, organized by Texas A&M University Mays Business School, has provided inspiring original content for retail executives since it first launched in 1985.

“Most retailers can no longer differentiate on product or price alone. Experiences play a central role in brand perception,” says Kelli Hollinger, Director of the Center for Retailing Studies at Mays Business School. “The Retailing Summit’s speakers will address how their companies deliver engaging experiences successfully across both the physical and digital worlds to excite customers and drive sales.”

In his segment, “Disrupting the Disruptors: Using Brick-and-Mortar As Your Digital Advantage,” Rutledge will speak to how retailers with physical store locations can win back their clicks from the “digital Disruptors,” i.e. sites that leverage a business’s physical locations and brand to drive local organic traffic to their online marketplace. These Disruptors take a business’s most valuable asset—their brick and mortar stores—and use them to push that very same brand off of the first page of organic search results.

In a world where the likes of Business Insider and The Atlantic report that “retail is dead,” Rutledge will prove that even though the landscape has shifted, retail is far from dead—especially digitally.

“Consumers are searching for local information everywhere, on every device, at every point in the purchase process. The Disruptors know this and are using your locations, products, and services to capture traffic. Then they sell it back to you,” notes Rutledge.

He’ll use real-world search examples of Disruptors at work and National Brands that are either abdicating their location data to Disruptors, or fighting back and winning more call, clicks, and retail traffic.

Other Retailing Summit speakers include CEOs from two of America’s top five retail firms by sales volume and various leaders from well-known brands like Dollar General, Walgreens, Crayola, and Johnson & Johnson.

Learn more about Retailing Summit 2017 and follow Brian Rutledge on LinkedIn and Twitter for in-the-moment updates during the conference.