Who Knows What OmniChannel Means?

Have you ever seen or heard of the Merriam-Webster word of the year?  In passing, I have seen this on occasional years but if I had to pick a word that I saw most often in my research that became somewhat valuable in trying to understand companies, that word would be.....OmniChannel.So what does OmniChannel mean and where is it used at?  According to clodtags below is a snippet of how they define OmniChannel

• Omni comes from the word Omnis which can mean all or universal. This is in comparison to other categories out there, like “multichannel”, from the Latin word Multus, meaning multiple or many and from cross-channel, derived from the Latin word Crux, meaning to go across. The way that many are explaining omnichannel today is: ‘cross channel being done well’. Examples are often that the mobile app should match the responsive design of the website which should thematically reflect the look and feel inside the store. We’d argue that doing cross channel well with the user in mind, is not worthy (nor useful) enough to deserve a new category. Instead, we hold the belief that Omnichannel is something new and notable, even revolutionary, not just a marginal evolution of existing thinking.

Even though my wife works in the advertising and market arena, it wasn't until Barry Ritholtz of the Masters In Business podcast hooked me up with Professor Scott Galloway of NYU and his weekly winners and losers segment on YouTube.Scott and his associate do the best job in explaining what OmniChannel is and means in the two videos below but in layman's terms, it is the ability for a company to use multiple sources to generate revenue.  These revenue sources can work alone or can work together in which case generally lead to higher revenues and profit!We put together a post, Why Retail Stores are the New Black in which we agreed with Galloway's research that brick and mortar stores could do battle with Amazon because they had a distribution network far more expansive than Amazon as a store such as Macy's or Dick's could act as its own distribution center.  That trade-in stock price terms hasn't paid off yet, but I still believe that it is a very viable strategy.