Closing the retail experience divide

Customer expectations are evolving faster than most retail brands can manage. And as those expectations change, loyalty is eroding. Shoppers are less concerned with where they purchase and more concerned with what they consider value. For the marketers stuck in a past built around transactional marketing, strict channels, and mass messaging, 2026 could be a serious wake-up call.

Of course, for every brand getting left behind, there are others—namely, those who have embraced this evolution—that are poised to see outsized results. Economic headwinds haven’t necessarily shrunk the size of customer wallets, but it has made buyers more discerning. The brands that understand this nuance, and who center their tech stack around the modern shopping experience, could succeed as their competitors falter.

How will brands meet the moment? By closing the retail experience divide. This divide represents a tangible gap between the experience shoppers expect and the way marketers have traditionally engaged with audiences. Artificial intelligence is making it easier to bridge the divide, but AI without a strategy is just another tool. Let’s look at the ways AI and strategy can combine to build deeper, better relationships with shoppers.

Moving beyond transactions

Brands do not sell products alone. They sell a lifestyle, or a cause, or convenience. Yet many marketing campaigns are still built around simple transactions. By building campaigns based on past interactions and previous purchases alone, many retail brands are missing the mark and setting the stage for reduced loyalty.

Yet marketers still believe they are creating campaigns that customers want. Braze research found that 93% of brands believe they understand their customers more deeply than ever before, while only 53% of consumers say that brands are anticipating their wants and needs.

Personalizing product recommendations, while valuable, isn’t enough for shoppers. By creating an engagement strategy that focuses on a holistic view of shoppers, marketers can move past transactional marketing and focus on relationship building. This includes helping shoppers get the most out of their purchases, showing them how their spending affects social causes, or connecting them to a greater community of customers who think and feel the same way that they do.

Community and relationship-based marketing starts with a holistic view of data across digital and physical touchpoints. When AI can surface all the varied aspects of a given customer, it can help marketers better understand what that customer wants and then connect them not just to the products they love, but to the experiences they’ll engage with as well.

What does value mean?

Value could mean many things, but in the post-pandemic economic climate, it has often translated to affordability. Value is the new baseline for many retailers, as brands retool pricing structures, adopt and evolve private labels, and market loyalty programs to deliver affordability for consumers.

There are limits to affordability, however. A singular focus on affordability could largely ignore how consumers actually define value in the real world. Only those brands that have a holistic understanding of every shopper’s wants and needs will know how to market value to customers no matter how they tend to define it.

Let’s take a grocery store for example. The grocer offers private label brands that are generally more affordable for cost-conscious parents cooking making quick meals for busy kids while also selling boutique ingredients for experience-minded foodies who love cooking exotic new meals. Both the family and the foodie define value in wildly different ways. The parents value fast, affordable, and easy make while the foodie values quality ingredients and new culinary adventures.

The brands that combine technology and AI to understand the difference between the family and the foodie can meet each customer where they are with campaigns that accentuate how each defines value, whether it’s affordability or experience.

Move fast or risk breaking things

There is a world where incrementally improving customer relationships happens strategically over time. But customers do not want to wait for brands to catch up. They want fast discovery, fast relevance, and fast fulfillment. Brands that cannot satisfy these expectations risk losing business to the competitors that can.

Marketers need to move quickly to deliver on shopper expectations. It’s not just fast shipping, but rapidly building campaigns based on digital and physical interactions that are deeply relevant to the individual needs of customers. That requires AI-driven personalization, campaigns built for individual shoppers at the moment of engagement, and fast resolutions to any customer concerns.

Of course, AI can help brands move faster, but only if customers believe what they’re seeing is authentic. If that sentence sounds like a tightrope, that’s because it is. Marketers have AI solutions for everything, but it’s the quiet tech, the AI that builds authenticity and speed without sacrificing quality, that will bridge the experience divide quickly (and do it without relying on campaigns that feel like AI slop).

Final thoughts

Building relationships with customers isn’t easy. Especially at a time when the only thing harder to come by than loyalty is customer attention. Focusing on relationships, offering real value, and moving quickly can help savvy marketers move forward through what could be trying times, but only when data, AI, and human innovation are working together. Braze is leading the way with AI-first solutions to marketers’ biggest challenges. With sophisticated models that personalize every aspect of a brand’s campaigns.

Want to know how? Check out the state of retail personalization by downloading our white paper today.