PIM-System

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are significant days in the retail world. And in this increasingly digital world, more and more shoppers are headed online to find gifts, hunt for bargains, and deck the halls.

Consumer spending during the Holiday 2022 season shifted some, returning to more “typical” levels compared to the outsized holiday spending seen in 2020 and 2021, when consumers spent and shopped more – likely as a result of plans, trips, and others celebrations that were stifled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

With all the media noise about “big data” and artificial intelligence (AI), it’s easy to forget that data has been at the heart of retail success since well before the digital era.

Without a doubt, Artificial Intelligence is the number one story of 2023, with breaking news and hyperbolic predictions popping up daily. Retailers and their partners are justifiably concerned. Retail marketing and advertising directors are asking what AI will mean for their current operations and the future of retail marketing in general.

Large, national retailers – and even smaller, regional ones – often must cope with several logistical and market challenges. One of these is the rapid proliferation of media channels. In each one, they must establish a good relationship with current and potential customers, preserving the retailer’s brand without sacrificing accuracy or time-to-market with each campaign.

In the course of digitization, consumer buying behavior has changed and, accordingly, so have consumer expectations of a brand's sales channels. More and more customers are shopping online and interacting with brands in new and interesting ways, as new technologies also constantly offer new opportunities for contact.

The weekly circular has long been a staple marketing and advertising tool for grocery chains and other large retailers. To cope with the disruptions of digital media, retailers have experimented with various ways to cut costs, sometimes discontinuing the printed versions of circulars (especially as newspaper inserts) only to bring them back in other ways. Recently, a national grocery retailer paused the printed versions of their weekly ads but then brought them back as regular mailers, with targeted promotions and QR codes to take customers to sale items on the website.

Retail marketing has never been as complex to manage as it is now. Creative services and production managers must cope with the daily demands of promotional campaigns covering multiple locations on various print and digital channels. All this leaves little time to innovate and swiftly respond to emergencies and ad hoc requests.

These days, you cannot turn on the news or read a publication without seeing something scary and fascinating about Artificial Intelligence or AI. Nearly as often, you see ads by Amazon or IBM promoting cloud computing and “big data.” What you see or read far less often is a down-to-earth explanation of ordinary business data and how that data can make marketing a truly efficient process.

E-commerce is here to stay. No one can argue that we’re ever returning to a predominantly brick-and-mortar retail experience. Even before the pandemic supercharged the trend, ordering products and services online had become the norm for millions of shoppers. The real questions are: How does the e-commerce experience inform retail marketing and advertising strategy?