What Industry Leaders Are Getting Right, according to the new eBook Navigating the Future of Retail: Conversations with Experts
Today's retail executives face an interconnected set of challenges. How do they create loyalty programs that build genuine relationships? How can they achieve true personalization at scale? Where will AI investments have maximum impact? How do you build profitable retail media networks?
These questions are shaping retail's competitive landscape, and retailers like Giant Eagle and Petco are leading the way. They're actively experimenting and adapting their approaches to these four interconnected areas, supported by partners like Google Cloud and Eagle Eye.
As these standout brands are reimagining customer connection, their executives are also answering your questions in a new eBook, Navigating the Future of Retail: Conversations with Experts, which you can download here.
Here are four elements of modern retail success:
Traditional loyalty programs collected points and delivered discounts. What's been missing is the connection that ties customers, data, loyalty and retailers together. Successful programs must generate insights, drive personalized actions and measure impact to build genuine customer relationships.
The DIAL framework (Data, Insight, Action, Loyalty) illustrates how programs can operate as strategic assets rather than cost centers. Retailers using this data-driven approach to tactical loyalty campaigns have realized an average of 3.8% like-for-like sales uplift, even in price-sensitive markets.
DIAL principles also result in more meaningful brand-customer relationships.
We support the full pet-care journey, not just reward transactions. Our goal is to make customers feel like we know them and help them do what's best for their pet at every step.
Tara Dalrymple, Senior Group Product Manager at Petco
True one-to-one personalization seemed impossible until AI-powered solutions made it both practical and possible. These systems instantaneously create individualized offers, using existing purchase data while accounting for contextual triggers like weather, local events or current basket composition.
"At Petco, we already use AI to personalize promotions and timely offers," notes Dalrymple. This means understanding not just what pet supplies a customer needs, but when they're likely to need them based on purchase cycles, pet life stages and seasonal patterns.
Rather than chasing every AI tech integration opportunity, successful retailers focus investments on five core areas:
In addition to these focus areas, Paul Tepfenhart, Global Director of Retail & Consumer Strategy at Google Cloud, emphasizes the critical priority of moving "from descriptive to predictive analytics, including demand forecasting, churn prediction and out-of-stock prevention." These applications directly impact profitability by reducing waste, retaining customers and ensuring product availability.
At its best, retail media is an omnichannel vehicle for providing value to retailers, CPG brands and most importantly, customers. High-performing retailers use loyalty programs to power retail media networks with real-time, first-party customer data. This combination creates targeting capabilities that traditional media channels can't match.
When retailers can show sales attribution stemming from their retail media networks, the CPG brands they work with will be "talking about retail media in the same sentence as they'd be talking about other forms of income that they're able to drive," according to Jeff Baskin, Global Chief Revenue Officer at Eagle Eye. This emphasis on measurable results is driving the evolution of retail media platforms, and retailers that get it right will have a significant advantage over their competitors.
The path forward isn't about choosing between loyalty, personalization, AI or retail media; it's about integrating all these capabilities into cohesive customer experiences. As the expert experiences in our new eBook illustrate, success comes from customer-centric approaches grounded in practical implementation.
Ready to learn how retail leaders are implementing these strategies? Our new eBook, Navigating the Future of Retail, features extended insights from executives at Petco, Giant Eagle, and Google Cloud. Download your free copy to discover the practical approaches these companies use to create better customer experiences while driving measurable business results.