for good reasons. After all, it’s all about operating as an efficient mart. But I believe that emotion is an ingredient of continuous commerce. If you think that’s a trifle soft for this hard-nosed business, then consider this. We have a partner – Motista – who has taken a big data approach to emotion. They’ve spent seven years looking at over a billion emotional data points for a sample of 1.2 million US customers from over hundreds of retailers. What they show, conclusively, is that emotional connection is the glue that holds omni-channel together. As Scott Magids, Motista’s CEO, points out: “we want to shop at retailers where we feel we belong with other people.” The “what” of commerce is easy to define, but it’s the “why” that gets emotional: that sense of belonging but also sometimes of escape, or of indulgence, or as Magids says, reinforcement of the family. The “endless aisle”, a seamless journey where online and offline blend to offer customers an integrated retail experience, is omni-channel done correctly by Adidas. Motista’s big data on emotion can shed illumination. To assess the financial impact of emotional connection and convergence, we segmented the landscape of retail customers into three groups: