Real Retail #2
We're Measuring What's Easy. Not What Matters.
The problem isn't a lack of retail data. It's that the easiest signals to capture can become proxies for the behaviors that actually matter.
The second Real Retail essay pushes the measurement question further. Purchase data is valuable, but it captures the end of a journey better than the influence that happened along the way.
Store traffic, product interaction, staff-assisted engagement, in-environment media and downstream purchase can all shape consumer behavior while remaining difficult to connect inside one attribution system.
When measurement determines investment, those blind spots matter. The goal should not be to measure everything. It should be to identify the interactions that materially influence behavior and build better ways to understand them.
That is the premise behind Real Retail: measurement should follow influence, rather than allowing ease of measurement to define what counts.