Understanding the future consumer

The consumer is constantly changing, and companies need to adapt and change quickly in order to keep up — or, even better, retailers can be proactive and get ahead of the curve. Following her presentation at NRF 2020: Retail's Big Show, Andrea Bell, Head of WGSN Insight for WGSN joined the Retail Gets Real podcast team to talk more about where the customer will be in 2022 and what retailers can do to prepare.

Bell believes that the biggest point of differentiation in 2022 will be the dichotomy between different generations. The diverging and segmentation of customers will make vanilla marketing more difficult. “We're so focused on the data of demographics that we're not looking at those consumer sentiments,” Bell says. “And those are really shifting how retailers should engage in terms of just branding, but also messaging and communications as the retail landscape gets more fragmented.”

Listen to the full episode to learn more about how to reach the next generation of digital natives, the emerging growth of live stream shopping, and how AR and VR are moving from hype to convenience-driving features.