For many, the retail forecasts for holiday 2012 are conservative, ranging from flat to modest increases over last year. But Kurt Salmon Associates is taking a more bullish stance. The global management consultancy is looking at a solid 3.6 percent upturn.

“Sales in key holiday segments—clothing, electronics, sporting goods and toys—are expected to outpace last year’s performance and drive the bulk of end-of-the-year improvement in consumer spending,” said John B.R. Long, Kurt Salmon partner and head of global marketing.

Although the majority—30 percent—of retail executives surveyed in Kurt Salmon’s “2012 Apparel & Retail Technology Outlook” are projecting slightly lower gains (0.1 percent to 3 percent) this holiday, Long said he expects the end result to be better than expected.

“While consumers continue to say they’re uncertain about the global economy, their intent to spend this holiday season, coupled with modest improvements in key economic indicators, suggests solid sales for U.S. retailers,” he said.

As the economy slowly rebounds, retailers are in a position to capitalize on the recovery—whether by leveraging the consumer data collected at the point of sale (POS) or implementing new technologies to attract and engage the consumer.

California Apparel News Executive Editor Alison A. Nieder recently caught up with Long to discuss the findings in his company’s recent survey—and the outlook for the year ahead.

Everyone looks at comp-store sales to gauge retail strength. You say it doesn’t tell the whole story. What else should we be looking at?

Comp-store sales should never be used as a single gauge of a retailer’s financial performance or health. You need to compare at least several other metrics over a multiple-month timeframe amongst several competitors (in similar businesses) to holistically assess a retailer’s performance: sales per square foot, gross margin —both percentage and dollar amount, EBITDA, inventory turns, inventory cost per square foot, transactions average sale and conversion rate (if reported).

The retail executives you’ve surveyed continue to say they want to “manage their costs aggressively.” And yet, they “protected their cash at hand” during the recession and now lack “a plan for investment.” Are retailers waiting to see what their competitors do or which direction the market takes before making investment decisions?

It’s likely a bit of both. Consumer spending is not growing dramatically, so retailers are focusing on investments that will improve their competitiveness whilst overall being very careful not to overspend. Retailers, like consumers, have grown accustomed to saving some spare money for a rainy day.

You say many companies have a “phenomenal amount of data on their customers, and they don’t know how to assimilate that data.” What kind of information do they have?

Retailers often have some or all of the following on each and every customer that makes a purchase: all of their past spending history, their overall profitability (i.e., how profitable for the retailer is what the customer bought), their home address (and its proximity to the store), their online purchasing history (sometimes even their online browsing history), their shopping frequency, their returns history, etc. As you can see, there is a lot of data that can be—and is being—collected; the real quot;magicquot; is when retailers are able to use the data to shape their strategic, merchandising, pricing and marketing decisions, etc.

You mentioned there are other industries doing a better job of reaching the consumer and giving them more options to interact. You specifically mentioned banking and travel. Can you give some examples how those industries are succeeding while apparel retail is not?

Virtually every bank offers customers a variety of access points to its services and provides highly efficient, customer-friendly interactions. Examples of multiple access points are physical branches, online banking, mobile banking applications and telephone banking. In almost all cases, a bank’s customers can execute almost any type of transaction on any of these platforms seamlessly. Some great examples of banking innovations include using your mobile phone to scan and then virtually deposit a check via a mobile application, sending friends money immediately to their bank account using a mobile app and paying for purchases using your mobile phone. Although retailers were on the dot-com bandwagon early, we’re only starting to see retailers introduce robust mobile apps and social-media platforms. At Kurt Salmon, we believe that banks and airlines have transformed their customer experiences, and these same customers are now demanding that retailers follow suit.

I like your comment about mobile phone shopping: quot;You can be standing at Target and, yet, buying from Amazon.quot; You also mentioned a Korean grocery-store chain that put posters with quick-response codes for key items in the subway so consumers could shop on their way home and have goods delivered. Are there new technologies specifically for fashion retail?

In terms of being in one store and buying in another, the issue for apparel is that sizes are not universal. Even supposedly standard shoe sizes vary from brand to brand, so it’s often harder for customers to truly find substitutable items.

As for fashion retail applications, there are several on the horizon. One of the best is Cisco Systems’ quot;Magic Mirror,quot; which allows customers to virtually try on outfits. Another is sales associates’ use of the tablet PCs on apparel selling floors to help locate out-of-stock items or special sizes for a customer without having to leave the selling floor or walk the customer over to a POS register. There are lots of innovations being tested at apparel retailers across the globe.