Navigating the Future of Retail

This year’s Groceryshop and Connected Commerce Summit brought together retailers, brands and eCommerce leaders to discuss the latest trends shaping the future of consumer shopping. Within topics like retail media and AI, the discussions brought forward one clear message for Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) brands: data harmonization is now a requirement, no longer a benefit. It’s a significant driver for growth.

With consumer behavior and expectations changing continuously, brands are challenged to deliver seamless experiences, provide ROI, and innovate at scale.

Here are five significant trends in retail that we observed—and what they mean for companies in the industry.

1. Omnichannel is the new normal

One of the major trends in retail shows that shopping has become omnichannel. Today’s consumers navigate seamlessly between the digital and physical channels—browsing via mobile, purchasing in a store, and using click-and-collect services. For CPG companies, this shift means that digital and physical operations can’t be treated as separate silos anymore.

An increase in omnichannel shopping behavior indicates that brands need to provide a seamless experience, incorporating both online and in-store touchpoints into the whole customer journey. With over 80% of consumers using multiple channels to complete a purchase, a single view of the customer is necessary to create a seamless experience.

However, omnichannel shopping also comes with an overwhelming number of data points to be analyzed. And many brands are still facing challenges with fragmented data throughout data sources and departments, making it impossible to drive personalization, or even stitch together the full customer journey.

To build a comprehensive view, brands have to integrate data across each touchpoint – eCommerce transactions, in-store purchases, loyalty programs, and social media. This is the only way to recognize the entire customer journey, and put relevant content at every stage with the goal to improve consumer experience and drive growth.

2. Data ≠ Insights: Activation is the real challenge

Gathering more data does not ensure better decision making. In fact, converting data into actions is where the real challenge lies.

Many organizations still work with siloed, fragmented data that never gets transformed into insight. This makes it challenging to optimize marketing spend, refine product offerings, and improve inventory management. But, when the data is unified, brands are able to monitor omnichannel campaigns in real time and pivot strategy from consumer behaviors.

While it’s always recommended to start with “test and learn” pilots, it is also critical to move beyond them. Without activation, data simply becomes a cost center instead of being a growth driver.

3. AI hype meets data reality

Artificial Intelligence is still one of the hottest topics between brands and retailers. The AI opportunity is massive, and it opens up a world of new, interesting use cases. These might be personalized recommendations, improved demand forecasting, AI shopping assistants, or even Agentic Commerce.

However, it’s currently underutilized with 75% of organizations still in a pilot or planning phase. Only 3% of companies in the industry have fully adopted AI so far.

Most companies are aware that they need to move faster, and indeed the next 12 months will be decisive. Companies that don’t take a step forward, in 12-month time could start to get left behind.

But even companies that have already adopted AI are facing a daunting reality – AI is only as good as its data input. Many brands have spent significant amounts on AI tools but are still struggling to scale their efforts beyond pilot projects. Why? Because their data is inconsistent, incomplete, or siloed.

And without clean and harmonized data, results from AI models cannot be trusted by the finance, sales and marketing departments, failing to produce valuable results. Brands that focus on data quality prior to AI implementation will gain a competitive advantage.

4. Retail media growth — But where is the proof?

Retail media networks are booming, giving brands new opportunities to reach shoppers directly on retail platforms like Amazon, Walmart and Tesco. However, despite the increase in spending one overwhelming question takes centre stage: how ROI can be measured.

We’re seeing a big opportunity in retail media data giving companies everything they need to engage with consumers in a measurable and cost-effective way. However, it works best when brands can follow customer behavior at various touchpoints — from viewing an ad on a retail platform to making a purchase in-store or online.

It’s not surprising that there is an increasing need to tie in-store and online sales impact to retail media spend. Analytics teams are currently under pressure when it comes to reporting and measurement to justify expenditure. They have to prove ROI on retail media, but without aggregated data, the attribution is not straightforward.

By unifying online, in-store performance and purchase history data, brands can link campaigns with real-world sales results. This allows them to maximize spend and show clear ROI, making retail media less of a hopeful experiment and more of an established growth driver.

5. In-store execution: An important driver of retail success

Despite the rise of e-commerce, physical stores are still an important way for consumers to interact with brands. Most buying decisions—especially impulse purchases—are also still made in-store. No surprise why in-store execution is gaining more importance than ever.

In-store execution is basically the process of taking corporate strategies such as pricing, promotions, and planograms and turning them into local experiences that directly impact the consumer’s decision to buy. Brands are both keeping their revenue safe and making consumer loyalty when all the products are stocked, displays are set up correctly, and prices are accurate.

We’re seeing that it’s becoming a required component for companies to secure growth and profitability, and the future will largely depend on data. Retailers are adopting AI-powered tools and mobile-first platforms to ensure compliance, optimize layouts, and personalize product placement. Interactive displays and real-time reporting will become standard, allowing brands to combine online convenience with in-store engagement.

On the other hand, brands are spending huge amounts to get good shelf space, prime spots for promotions, special locations, in-store displays, and retail media. However, with fragmented data, these investments just stand alone. And when it comes to justifying the budgets, teams are struggling to explain why they should keep spending the same amount on in-store execution – or spend even more.

Connecting these significant investments to other data like sales, market share, consumer insights and media performance is a relatively small effort compared to the initial investment, but they would mean a huge step towards having a source of truth when it comes analyzing the data and quickly adapting the strategy to the latest changes in the consumer behavior.

The common thread: Data harmonization

In all five trends in retail – omnichannel, data activation, AI, retail media and in-store execution – the takeaway was clear: Data harmonization is key. Without it, brands cannot scale innovation, personalize experiences, or prove ROI.

Getting from experimentation to scale, measuring attribution and proving value are still big hurdles. CMOs and eCommerce leaders are being asked to demonstrate business impact, and harmonized data is the key to unlocking that.

With harmonized data, brands can confidently scale projects, connect digital investments to real sales outcomes, and uncover deeper insights into customer behavior and market trends.

Looking ahead

With evolving customer expectations, brands that will succeed are the ones that consider data harmonization as their main strategic goal. The trends clearly show that data will be the most valuable asset in the future. But only if it is accurate, unified, and can be acted upon.

So, what really matters is using it in an efficient way to provide consumers with seamless experiences and drive measurable business growth.

This is a call to action for CPG and FMCG brands to act now!

If you’re interested in how Redslim can help your brand making it a reality, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team of experts.