Wal-Mart embraces the future

  • By VIMAL PATEL

  • Posted: Thursday, April 7, 2011 7:00 a.m.
  • Text size: A A A


Retailers have to figure out how to adapt to a new world of social media but still cling to basic customer satisfaction principles, a top Wal-Mart executive said Wednesday at Texas A&M.


"The fundamentals of retailing and what customers want, that's not changing," Eduardo Castro-Wright, vice chairman of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and 1975 Texas A&M mechanical engineering graduate said in a lecture titled "The Future of Retailing."


But shopper behavior certainly is changing because of the rapid rise of the Internet and, in recent years, a new wave of connectivity that includes 400 million smart phones worldwide and Facebook overtaking pornography as people's No. 1 activity on the Internet, he said.


"Everytime a disruptive technology has appeared, mankind always adjusts to it," he said. "We'll have to learn how to integrate the assets that we have with technology to ensure that we can compete in this new world."


And the world's largest retailer is adapting. More than 10 percent of yearly contacts Wal-Mart had with customers were online -- about 1.2 billion of more than 10 billion, Castro-Wright said.


The Internet and social media have changed advertising, and "there's nowhere to hide" in this new era in which a product "cannot hide behind massive marketing campaigns," he said.


"It is changing the way we as advertisers think about how we actually capture the attention of customers," Castro-Wright said. "The 30-second commercial is being replaced by the 30-second upload, or 30-second recommendation, or 30-second comment."


Castro-Wright, who joined Wal-Mart to head the retailer's store operation in Mexico, was presented the 2011 Visionary Merchant Award by the Mays Business School's Center for Retailing Studies.


He was the keynote speaker for the M. B. Zale Visionary Merchant Lecture Series, which concluded an invitation-only conference.


Castro-Wright left his role as president and chief executive officer of Wal-Mart U.S. to lead the company's efforts at building the Wal-Mart of the future, he said.


The building blocks of his success with the company, he said, were forged long before that, as a Texas A&M student.


"The years I spent here at Texas A&M," he said, "have made me the person that you see in front of you today."

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