Customer Acquisition

Something strange is happening in e-commerce. Consumer spending is up. Online time is up. Yet traffic to major retail websites is declining. The answer is actually quite simple: shoppers are changing how they research and where they buy. Their starting point, which used to be about discovery, is now where they're making decisions. Many may…

If it feels like customers are harder to win over right now, it’s because they are. Across categories and price points, we are all scrutinizing purchases more carefully, weighing alternatives more thoroughly, and demanding clearer value before we buy. Several forces are converging to create this moment of heightened selectivity. Consumers are more informed than…

Retailers have long allowed customers to trade old devices for credit toward new purchases; it’s a well-established industry practice. And yet, most retailers still don’t treat it as a core sales driver. With consumer interest in trade-ins growing, now is the time for retailers to examine how they structure and market their programs. Currently, there’s…

For years, retailers have understood something simple but powerful: consumers rarely begin their purchase journey on retailer websites. They start with research. Increasingly, that research happens on Reddit. According to the platform, 71 percent of people who discover a brand go on to research it there, while 74 percent say Reddit helps them make faster…

The search bar isn’t dead, but it’s no longer running the show. For years, retail marketing teams optimized content for search engines that crawled text and hunted for keywords. Now, generative artificial intelligence tools, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, answer shoppers' questions directly, drawing from a much wider pool of user-generated signals. They determine which…

Your next most valuable customer isn't a person. It's an artificial intelligence agent, and it's already shopping. Whether through personal assistants or retailer-embedded tools, AI is shifting retail from search-driven discovery to intent-driven commerce, where the sale is won before a consumer starts browsing. Think that's just wishful thinking from people who work in tech?…

In the brick-and-mortar retail landscape, businesses often operate with a significant blind spot: they don't truly know their customers. While digital loyalty programs can yield match rates of up to 30 percent, in-store rates tell a different story. In-person retail identification often lingers in the single digits, leaving the vast majority of in-store shoppers categorized…

Retail media sits at the top of every chief marketing officer's agenda … and for good reason. It promises precision targeting, measurable sales outcomes, and proximity to customers at the point of decision. Meanwhile, affiliate and creator programs have evolved from emerging channels into reliable, cost‑effective, and crucial drivers of revenue, but the majority of…

At a recent activation, we had a diverse audience in the room — brand decision-makers, senior retail buyers, marketing leads, category managers, etc. But they weren't the only ones there. Their spouses showed up. Their kids. Close friends. Mentors from previous jobs. Nobody asked them to bring those people. They just did. Most brands would…

For retailers everywhere, a primary objective for achieving success in 2026 is converting global demand into revenue. In an interconnected world, your brand can be discovered by a global audience across platforms and languages. A consumer in Argentina, for example, may encounter your brand through an English search result automatically translated into Spanish, without any…