How the Landscape for Retail is Changing in 2017

Retail trends are becoming more strategic, more data-driven, and more personalized. If you’ve been keeping up with retail news, you saw this coming. Omnichannel principals (developing seamless transitions between your digital and in-store experience) have been advancing steadily, so predicting and preparing for this continued trend will be the focus of retailers and marketing departments in the coming year.

What do these trends mean for retailers? You might be surprised with new developments following in their wake.

Notice Who’s Doing the Spending

For the first time in history, men are spending more than women, by nearly 15%. Expert, Christine Sica, Retail analyst and CEO of Mox Group Strategists is calling for a 8.3% jump in the menswear market. That’s a huge leap, compared to the 1.5% analysts are expecting in women’s apparel.

The apparel industry isn’t the only market that’s going to see a shift in primary purchasers. Grocery shopping will be shared between household members. More than half of households divide shopping errands. For the food service industry, this could mean a necessary shift in marketing messages and tactics. They’ll rely heavily on data collected from rewards programs to identify shopping preferences based on the individual family member.

Make Shopping Personal

 With more companies investing in omnichannel and intelligence-driven analytics platforms, you can expect to see personal and targeted shopping experiences online and in-stores. Some may feel a little hesitant to accept that brands are using our digital footprints to ‘sell us’. The real results, are seeing much more of the exact things you want. That’s what the data-driven marketing and product placement is all about.

Buying Small

 Local and small shops are finally having their day. The retail landscape is seeing a shift in demographics. Both baby boomers and younger millennials are expecting more for their money and calling for more personal retail experiences. While the big-box stores are firing every data-drenched cannon in the arsenal, small shops are still winning the war on personal and authentic connections with their market.

How Offerings are Developed

 In-line with personalization and omnichannel trending tactics, we can expect to see more brands co-creating offerings based on digital and social media engagement. As smaller brands start to scale, they’ll be more capable of having dialogue with their markets about the strengths and weaknesses of their offerings. Regardless of marketing or research budgets, they’ll be able to develop data-supported products and services that are both interesting and culturally significant to their buyer personas.

This upcoming year will be ripe with changes in the retail sector. Growing your business’s personalization and communication strategies will be vital. For more information about developing experiential retail, visit our On-Demand Retail blog.