Last week, the National Retail Federation (NRF) held “Retail’s Big Show 2009″ in New York City against a backdrop of falling retail sales. Wal-Mart and Deloitte executives spoke about the economy, while we discussed the opportunities of multicultural marketing in a multichannel retail environment. During the conference, we journeyed from the subprime to the linguistic.

• In his valedictory as Wal-Mart CEO, Lee Scott said that he expected 2009 to be an unpleasant year for retail, observing that some consumers view not buying and being debt-free as a virtue. That’s a big change from years past when economists viewed the low rate of American savings as a negative phenomenon and credit as an unhealthy addiction.
• Carl Steidtmann, chief economist for Deloitte Research, said that the debt-laden consumer was a thing of the past. He expects that “many malls will go dark” in this annus horribilis. The subprime crisis will mean fewer households buying things for their homes. The downturn will be bad news for China as U.S. manufacturing became more cost-effective for companies currently producing goods.

Bad news notwithstanding, Retail’s Big Show boasted a huge technology exhibition showing off everything from Oracle Retail solutions to IBM Business Analysis tools to point-of-sale hardware and specialty sign-making gear. While the show floor sometimes seemed crowded, long-time delegates told us that attendance seemed to be about half of previous years. That shortfall didn’t keep the organizers from offering simultaneous interpretation into Portuguese and Spanish during the awards luncheon or providing a special lounge for international attendees.

Inside the presentation area of the conference, the situation was much more upbeat, especially in our panel on multichannel marketing. We discussed the difficulties and rewards of creating a customer experience that crossed both online and physical stores, calling up a certain mall food and furnishings retailer, Best Buy, the Teddy Bear Company, and Lowe’s. Technology, budget, and expertise were found to be problems, while all the panelists focused on the positive customer experience resulting from an integrated cross-channel customer view. We added the linguistic variable to the mix, emphasizing the size and spending power of multicultural cohorts in the United States and Lowe’s use of telephone interpreting services to connect its in-store customer to interpreters for any of 180 languages.

The NRF and sponsor American Express also announced their 2008 Customers’ Choice Award Winners: Amazon, Coldwater Creek, J.C. Penney, Lands’ End, L.L. Bean, Newegg.com, Nordstrom, Overstock.com, QVC, and Zappos.com. We dug into our 2007 analysis of communications response (80% webform, 20% e-mail) of the top 102 internet retailers to review how they dealt with inquiries in Spanish and English, and thus get a sense of how different the results might be at the Latino Retail Federation’s annual conference:

• Among the Customers’ Choice winners that had Spanish on their websites, in our search we found that Sears Holdings (Lands’ End) and Zappos did a great job in responding to inquiries from both their hispanohablante and Anglophone customers. Amazon did not fare nearly as well, responding to the Spanish inquiries with generic English messages and not responding at all to the English-language questions.
• For the other seven finalists, none of which sported any Spanish when we checked their websites, the results were mixed. Failing on Spanish responsiveness were Coldwater Creek, L.L. Bean, Newegg, Overstock, and QVC. On the other hand, J.C. Penney and Nordstrom did an okay job en español. Except for QVC, which fared badly in English, most companies did at least a passable job in responding to the English queries.
• Looking at all 102 firms, roughly 25 percent answered the Spanish inquiries, while a bit more than half actually answered in Spanish. The response rate was not much better for English, ranging between a third and 40 percent. We asked our questions via a webform at 78 percent of the companies, thus eliminating the spam filter factor for at least three quarters of the sample.
• Twenty-seven of the firms we contacted in Spanish suggested that we call them, but only 10 could handle the call in Spanish.

As it turned out, this session was the only one at the NRF conference that discussed the multicultural customer experience. The lesson we conveyed was that in a down economy, you should leave no cohort untouched. The retail slowdown may be a good time to review and improve your total customer experience, making sure that you know and respond to prospects interested in buying what you have to sell, even if it means following the lead of Lowe’s, Sears, and Zappos in creating a Spanish-friendly buying environment.