Is your retail brand a leader or a loser?

Retail brands are a significant part of our everyday life.

Retail has so much power over us, we even named a therapy after it. Retail therapy.

Those perfectly placed products in your favorite TV shows are telling you how to heal yourself and only your subliminal mind knows it.

We buy stuff from our favorite retail brands to feel better or to come out of depression (it’s really that simple). Our attitudes and personalities are influenced by our favorite brands, often without us even really knowing.

So, despite being a huge part of your life, how much do you know about your favorite retail brands? How are they surviving in this competitive era? What strategies are they following to stay at the top of their game?

Here are 10 critical factors retail brands leaders are focusing on.

1. Brand Loyalty Is Still King

Maintaining brand loyalty is one of the key factors to survive longer in the market.

The reason?

The customers call the shots in this generation. All the top brands have this calculation sorted out.

Remember the times you were made to feel special by a brand’s outstanding customer service? That’s what builds the foundation for your loyalty and keeps you coming back.

Modern retail brand leaders are more customer-focused. Customer experience, personal taste, philosophy and preference come first for them. The goal for leading brands is to create and cultivate a relationship with customers beyond purchase to make the brand feel like home to them.

2. $33.5 Trillion Worth of Market Value and Growing

According to Statista, Total retail sales in the United States were projected to amount to 5.99 trillion U.S. dollars in 2023, up from around 5.46 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019.

Deloitte reports that for retailers, understanding how consumer expectations are evolving has never been more important, especially with the convergence of supply chain, digital technologies, and other innovations.

In terms of how the next 12 months will play out, uncertainty is obviously a key lever. With a possible recession looming on top of current tariff tensions, retailers need a strategic plan that can handle with agility and speed. While the overall economy took a major hit in 2020, it also gives retailer leaders an opportunity to review their playbook for riding out a downturn (or major pandemic).

For retail brands who want to strengthen their preparedness for current market trends, they should focus on four factors critical to success:

• Determine why they matter
• Build a war chest to invest in growth
• Embrace technology and automation to better leverage growth
• Look outside their four walls to embrace partnerships

3. Concept Stores Are The Future

If you don’t know what a concept store is, let me give you an insight first. Concept stores are basically a smaller shop containing a limited number of products. It could either have a line of a particular brand or a fusion of multiple brands. More like a specialty store.

Such stores are created to maximize the customer’s experience when shopping. Let’s take Fabio Ferrillos Runaway concept store for example. His idea was to create a place to combine the colors and the shapes of the Luxuriant Vietnamese vegetation with the essential lines of the masters of ‘50s Italian design: Franco Albini, Borsani, and Carlo Scarpa.

Since being in an aesthetic place feeds your virtual life equally, shopping is more about deciding if a certain product goes with their lifestyle too. The brands are well aware of this and hence are selling emotions. So, the goal is to sell the experience more than the products.

4. Online Store Over Physical Stores

There is a huge shopping list lying in your drawer. But you don’t feel like moving a muscle. Goods aren’t going to walk to your doors. Or are they? Online shopping has made that possible for you. It saves you the time and trouble of going to the shop yourself.

Leading brands are leveraging this trend and providing the facilities possible to take advantage. Customers spend over $55 million monthly on online purchasing. To keep the customers coming and attract new ones, they’re online experience needs to bring the best of in person sales together with the convenience of shopping from the comfort of your own home.

5. Pop-up Stores

Pop-up stores - usually known as pop-up retail - is the trend of opening short-term sales spaces to run for a few days or weeks. It works like an experiment before opening up a large business. It’s a preferable strategy for the brands to draw customers in from different regions.

It allows building a personal connection with the customers. This way, the brands can sell more of their products easily. Since it’s 80% cheaper than a regular store, it comes as a budget-friendly and accessible option for all types of investors. This tactic has introduced a better shopping experience for both the customers and the brands.

6. Paper Bags

The paper bag we use today to carry most of our shopping was first invented by a self-taught engineer named Margaret Eloise Knight. This famous 19th-century woman produced the paper bags using the “Bag Machine” she invented. However, nowadays, the paper bags are manufactured using the updated version of “industrial origami machine.”

Since plastic bags are banned or are harmful to our environment, top brands are maintaining their bag policy and relying more on disposable paper bags. The paper bags are a safer option for in-store shopping purposes. Big brands brands believe that using these paper bags lessens the pollution rate to a great extent and makes them appear as responsible custodians of our changing planet.

7. M-Commerce

Brands are raving about the m-commerce recently. It lets you do online shopping right from your phone. For example, you can do in-app purchasing, mobile banking, and many more. Germany has titled this with m-commerce sales since it accounts for about 30% of their current GDP.

M-commerce provides a convenient and comfortable shopping/ transactional experience with its reach is getting wider every day. Who doesn’t have a phone today? You can guess the number of people using m-commerce, and the number is continuously growing.

As it helps the brands to know the user’s location, the services customers are using, their devices, and more, targeting customers according to the information is easier. M-commerce a very efficient marketing tool that industry leaders are leveraging more and more.

8. Designed To Keep You There

Once in the store or on the website, minutes can morph easily into hours. Whether you’re shopping online or offline, it can take a big chunk of your time away. That’s exactly how these websites and physical stores are built. To make you lose track of time and comfortable to be doing just that.

The more time you spend online or instore, the more you’ll spend money buying. Your favorite brand knows this very well by now. Besides what you have in your cart, they show you relevant products online according to your taste. Also, you might have seen employees approaching you - while shopping offline - with the products you might be interested in.

9. Retail Apocalypse Effects

Retail apocalypse means the closing down of numerous retail stores permanently due to various reasons. Customer’s shopping patterns play a major role. Many big retail chains in America have already disappeared due to the apocalypse. Studies predict more than 50% of such cases in the future.

Now, what’s the reason behind this? E-commerce takes a large share of the blame for this, but there’s no concrete (see what I did there?) evidence supporting that. The oversupply of malls a key factor for the retail apocalypse. With the shrinking of the middle class, big chains that were serving middle-class consumers mainly are seeing less opportunity.

10. Dealing With Fraud

You might think your favorite brands are free of smudges. But they are still professional companies with myriad challenges. Embarrassing situations like fraud cases and shoplifting hurt brand equity and exclusivity.

Studies show that there has been a decline in the retail business by 1.58% due to increased fraud cases. Brands are continuously taking measures to avoid huge losses from fraud and theft. In particular, returns fraud is often confusing and misleading making the challenge hard to resolve.

Closing Thoughts

As you can see, these details are not often privy to the public. You only see the glam and glitter and the end product. However, your favorite retail brand has had its own share of ups and downs and is still pulling out all stops to make sure you always remain loyal to the products that make you who you are and tell YOUR story.

Anything you’d like to add to the list?

Feel free to let me know in the comments.