Essential Retail Marketing Trends to Know

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The world of retail never stops moving, and 2025 promises some exciting new developments! Here’s what you can expect from your branded shopping experiences in the year to come.

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Ethical Retail

Marketing strategy consultants are noticing a powerful and growing trend for ethical and sustainable retail, which is now being driven by the new Generation Alpha that is starting to onboard with their own shopping preferences.

A brand can no longer afford to be casual about its ethical stance, which spans everything from packaging to supply chains. Find out more about these kinds of insights at Really Helpful Marketing.

Omnichannel Retailing

Call it what you like, omnichannel or hybrid shopping, but retailers must ensure they are offering a full spectrum of channels to their customers in order to enhance experiences and maximise sales. Today, over three-quarters of customers use more than one channel when they shop, and 95% review services and products online before they commit to a purchase.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha prefer to find products on their phones, use search engines to research them, try them in-person and in-store and then finish purchasing online. Expect to see this reflected in terms such as showrooming.

Smart Stores

Today’s customers also want increasingly tech-driven experiences, so it makes sense to create smart stores that offer them rich, immersive and highly personal brand engagements. These can capture approaches such as reward cards, insider loyalty programmes, in-store tablets for research and mobile phone offers as customers enter a physical store.

Brands must be creative about offering perks such as virtual fitting rooms, in-store digital kiosks and push notifications by geolocation. This drive for smart technologies is being further driven by the demand for AI generative experiences in marketing, and retailers now have a mandate to bring creative technology applications onboard as part of the omnichannel experiences described above.

Whether your retail brand is a micro-independent or a huge global brand, there’s no doubt that 2025 should be an exciting and transformative year for retail, with huge opportunities for businesses that are prepared to meet the challenge.