Looking back at 2024’s Agenda

In a retail environment shaped by shoppers who move flexibly between the digital and physical worlds, retailers must adapt their approaches to determining the optimal physical store strategies. Even the slickest in-store experience can be undermined by poor planning and low footfall. Retailers must select geographies that complement their existing primary and secondary markets, while ensuring their supply chain and fulfillment networks serve both in-store and ecommerce customers flexibly. In this session, attendees will hear fresh research on store locations and footprints designed to help them make decisions for their businesses.

Emerging technologies and tools, evolving working patterns, and the accelerated pace of trends, all set against a challenging macroeconomic backdrop, are a few of the key factors driving rapid changes in consumer behaviors, preferences, and demands. With customer acquisition costs seeming higher than ever, and conversion rates challengingly low, retailers and brands must do more to understand their customers’ shifting desires and expectations. In this session, one leading analyst will present on the imperatives for retailers looking to be truly customer-centric, while another will share deep insights into the wants and needs of the major generational audience segments and how to reach them effectively.

Approximately 70% of change management initiatives fail. Successful business transformations share common characteristics: strong leadership focus, organizational buy-in, thoughtful cultural and value alignment, and appropriate expectations around monetary and time requirements. In challenging times, successful retailer and brand executives are those who demonstrate strong leadership and a sense of purpose that overcomes inertia and justifies mandates for transformation. In these Track Keynotes, attendees will hear a pair of fireside chats with two Co-Founders. They will share the skills and qualities they rely on as they successfully drive organizational change with speed and agility.

Retailers and brands must constantly find new profitable and sustainable ways to grow, whether it be through entering new geographies, creating new product lines, or identifying new routes to market. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to growth, and retailers and brands must identify, assess, and implement the strategies most suited for their businesses. This session will feature two leading researchers sharing perspectives and insights. One will focus on key tensions that consumer brands face today, and the other will examine how to unlock growth opportunities related to unified commerce.

Retailers and brands today enjoy a diverse sales channel matrix extending far beyond traditional direct-to-consumer and wholesale. Marketplaces, resale, B2B, social media storefronts, and more all have the potential to drive new business, though retailers and brands must be discerning about which sales channels to pursue, striking the right balance between business goals and brand positioning. In this session, three senior consumer brand executives from disruptive, fast-growing brands will discuss the strategies and tactics they use to optimize the sales channel mix.

Slick content marketing, beautiful, high-quality imagery, shoppable video, AI-based recommendation tools, and human-like chatbots are just some of the tactics and technologies that make digital shopping more engaging. Faced with a wide array of options, retail leaders must consider which digital technologies fit with their brands and products. They must also think about customer preference: for some, you can never do too much, but for others, less is more. This Track Keynote will feature a senior executive from a furniture and home goods brand that has successfully engaged their digital shoppers, bringing excitement, surprise and joy to the ecommerce experience. She will share how they selected features and the business benefits unlocked by their engaging experiences.

Slick content marketing, beautiful, high-quality imagery, shoppable video, AI-based recommendation tools, and human-like chatbots are just some of the tactics and technologies that make digital shopping more engaging. Faced with a wide array of options, retail leaders must consider which digital technologies fit with their brands and products. They must also think about customer preference: for some, you can never do too much, but for others, less is more. This session will feature fireside chats with two companies that are rethinking how they engage digital shoppers, bringing excitement, surprise and joy to the ecommerce experience. They will share how they selected features and the business benefits unlocked by the experiences they are creating.

While large organizations often lack the lean agility of startups, fostering a culture of experimentation and innovation is crucial for any company to keep pace with retail’s fast-changing landscape. Leadership, structure, and psychological safety are integral to creating an environment where departments aren’t afraid to test and learn, potentially unlocking new revenue streams, products, and insights in the process. In these Track Keynotes, two C-level technology leaders, one from a leading department store and the other from a jewelry powerhouse, will share how each of them has successfully established experimentation as a fundamental pillar of her company's culture.

International expansion is a logical step for retailers and brands seeking scale beyond their home regions. At the same time, competition to win over new markets has never been higher, and an increasingly complex macroeconomic environment means companies must be strategic and cost-effective in their efforts. Regional marketplaces, licensing and distribution agreements, and other international partnerships present attractive opportunities for global expansion, though anyone exploring them must first ensure these partnerships align with customer needs and business goals. In this session, three executives from international retailers and brands will share their reasoning for expanding to new markets and the best practices that led them to success.

Almost half of shopping journeys start on a search engine and over half of U.S. consumers say that they’d like a better product discovery experience. It is therefore essential that retailers and brands improve how they tag and describe products so that they appear consistently wherever and whenever people are might look for them. More than this, retailers and brands must ensure that the products they present, across ecommerce sites, marketplaces, social media, and other digital channels, are engaging, timely, and relevant. In this session, three executives will share recent strategies and tactics that help shoppers find things they are looking for, and also discover things they may not have realized they want.

Nearly 85 percent of retail sales in the U.S. still take place in stores, highlighting the need for companies to get physical retail right. However, shopper expectations for store experiences have increased greatly, even as the role of the store has shifted to help support digital shopping. Innovative store concepts and designs create unique storytelling opportunities that engage customers, removing friction while also driving loyalty and sales. This session will open with brief presentations from two retail executives, followed by a roundtable discussion on the factors and considerations that distinguish good stores from great ones.

Only six percent of employees believe that leaders are well-equipped to manage a multigenerational workplace. Add to this the additional complexities of global, multicultural teams; ongoing racial and gender disparity; and hybrid or remote working models, and the need for leaders to move away from traditional leadership practices towards a more modern, forward-thinking approach becomes imperative. In this session, three senior executives from retailers and brands will share leadership best practices for cultivating a work environment that unifies generations, genders, and cultures.

Retail media networks excite retailers with their potential to drive substantial new, high-margin revenue. However, they need to take care that the new advertising revenue stream does not come at the expense of the retail customer experience. Online, customers expect a frictionless and visually appealing experience; in-store, customers want to easily identify and select products without unnecessary distractions. Retailers must therefore ensure that adding sponsored messages and marketing enhances rather than interferes with their customers' shopping journeys. In this session, three executives helping design and build retail media offerings will discuss how they have balanced prioritizing the customer experience while embracing the retail media opportunity.

Delivering unified customer experiences requires companies to re-imagine both internal and external alignment. Internally, silos must be broken down and teams, processes, technologies, and data must be coordinated to drive a unified external experience. Externally, a unified experience needs to be engineered to be both consistent and continuous, spanning multiple online channels as well as in-person experiences. In these Track Keynote interviews, two senior retail leaders will share their approaches to unified customer experiences, both customer-facing and behind-the-scenes of the organization.

Fast-changing customer needs and desires are forcing companies to re-think their old approaches to creating new products. Some retailers and brands have found success with co-created collections. More generally, those that are not listening to their customers risk missing out on emerging trends and opportunities. This session will feature three presentations outlining how leading companies are taking fresh approaches to product innovation, leveraging technology and outside-the-box thinking to update their approach to product strategy and design processes. They’ll share examples of their work, as well as talk about the agility and efficiency benefits they have unlocked.

Managing global trade and supply chains requires dealing with threats as broad as geopolitical tensions, shipping capacity constraints, security threats, and economic uncertainty. Better news for supply chains and the people who look after them is the rapid evolution of AI and other groundbreaking technologies and tools that are facilitating supply chain transformation. This session will feature three supply chain experts discussing the biggest trends defining global trade and the supply chain today. Shoptalk’s rapid-fire format keeps the conversation moving, covering significant ground and equipping attendees with new perspectives, data, and actionable ideas for understanding and addressing their own supply chain challenges.

The complexity of contemporary marketing strategies, tactics, and technologies creates challenges aligning marketing with the wider business. While half of CEOs say they’re comfortable with modern marketing tactics and tools, 66 percent of CMOs believe the opposite. Top-down buy-in on marketing goals and clear communication with the rest of the organization are critical to enable marketing to live up to its potential as a lever for growth and innovation. This Track Keynote features the CMO of an iconic apparel retailer. She will share how her team aligns marketing goals with the needs of the business, and builds connections to enable the sharing of data and insights across teams.

Retailers and consumer brands looking to spur growth are increasingly turning to gamification as a way to differentiate, attract new customers, and keep those they already have loyal and engaged. The strategy manifests across a wide variety of customer touchpoints, including marketing, shopping, post-purchase, and within modern loyalty programs. Less frequently, it also manifests in stores, via mobile apps and screens on smart shopping carts. This presentation by a leading retail analyst will explore how retailers are deploying gamified experiences to drive loyalty and differentiation. It will review the history of retail gamification, explore how the explosive growth of Temu has inspired U.S. shoppers to embrace the concept, and illustrate how retailers are incorporating it into their growth strategies.

The modern customer journey can have many touchpoints, online and offline, and far from a single “typical” path, as different shoppers follow many different routes from hearing from a brand to making a first purchase to loyalty. As these journeys become ever-more complex, retailers and brands have varying degrees of visibility into the key touchpoints and how they impact the likelihood of a consumer making a purchase. This session will feature a conversation with three retailers and brands that have excelled at gaining a full, holistic view of what’s influencing a customer’s behavior and, crucially, intervening at opportune moments to increase their chances of a sale.

Is the endless aisle the future, or is it the best aisle? Should retailers expand their product assortment or focus on tight editing and curation? Merchants face multiple potential strategies, with few definitive answers. Balancing science and art to ensure stocking an assortment that shoppers will want, in the right amounts, in the face of inherent uncertainty has long challenged the industry. In this serues of interviews, two retail giants and an exciting newer home brand will discuss how they are innovating and improving their merchandizing strategies, including how they leverage private brands, discover new products, and take a data-driven approach to ensuring that they have the right products for the right customer at the right time.

Although pandemic-era supply chain shocks have receded, local and global risks remain in the pursuit of getting raw materials to production and goods from factories downstream to shoppers. Resilience and agility remain key watchwords as companies design, upgrade, and manage their supply chains. The combination of data-driven and increasingly AI-enhanced tools with technologies like IoT are helping ensure that supply chain disruptions can be anticipated, planned for, and worked around. This session will showcase retailers and brands that have built structures, processes and cultures that support modern, resilient supply chains. They will share how they have identified and seized opportunities to level-up their supply chains and what their firms have gained in the process.

By 2027, Emarketer forecasts U.S. social commerce revenue will exceed $144 billion, more than double 2023's $67 billion. This rapidly growing, dynamic channel can enable retailers and brands to drive revenue and connections with customers, though success requires understanding social commerce’s many nuances. Demographic, cultural, and psychographic characteristics all affect how customers engage with and buy from retailers and brands on social media, and different platforms facilitate very different types of messaging and propensities to transact. This session will feature three executives engaging in a roundtable conversation about how they identify social media opportunities, and execute against them, in this fast-changing landscape.

According to the US Chamber of Commerce, almost four-fifths of customers say it's important that a post-purchase experience be positive, but only one percent of shoppers say vendors consistently meet expectations. How companies treat customers after they tap "buy" is crucial to winning or losing loyalty. Customers expect personalization, convenient delivery options, clear, regular and consistent communication, and a seamless returns process if needed. And the costs of this top-notch post-purchase experience must be bundled into the price of the product. In this session, three groundbreaking consumer brands will share the technologies and tools, as well as internal structures and processes, they have put in place to facilitate an outstanding post-purchase experience.

The rise of drop culture and burgeoning collaborations between brands, artists, celebrities, cultural institutions, and more has unlocked a wave of creativity across the retail world. Limited drops and collabs help collapse the customer journey, accelerating the time from awareness to purchase, as well as helping brands create buzz, introduce themselves to new customers, and/or cement loyalty with existing fans, even if they don’t make a purchase. This session will feature three executives who will share examples of how they are merging product innovation and marketing. They’ll then have a conversation about how their companies have embraced a mindset at the intersection of product, brand and marketing innovation, and what they’ve learned in terms of driving success for their brands.

With a continued focus on margins, many retailers are seeking to improve their profitability by strategically reviewing their operations to cut costs, minimize waste, and increase efficiency. As a side benefit, many of these moves also reduce environmental impact. Harmonizing these sometimes-conflicting priorities requires a thoughtful strategic approach, aided by a variety of technologies and data analytics tools. This session will feature three retail leaders who will present specific operational efficiency projects they have managed, with a focus on how they evaluated alternative approaches, and the benefits to the business (and the planet) that have resulted.

While the range of media, channels, and marketing technologies seems limitless, the fundamentals of full-funnel marketing remain the same: delivering a relevant message or experience at each stage of the customer journey to build interest and awareness, nurture relationships, and ultimately make a sale, all empowered and informed by data. The pace of marketing today requires that companies move faster, measure better, and ensure their messaging draws attention in a crowded market and across fragmented media. This session will open with a presentation on the state of the customer journey from the leader of a boutique agency. It will then shift to a panel conversation with three senior marketing executives who will share examples of recent work, illuminating how they are staying ahead of the curve, and in front of their customers.

Omnichannel customers spend from 1.5 to two times more than single-channel customers, as well as being up to three times more loyal. Therefore, delivering a consistent and continuous shopping experience across multiple online and offline channels is key for retailers and brands. This session will feature Founders/CEOs of three groundbreaking startup solutions focused on equipping retailers to deliver unified shopping experiences, along with a senior retail leader from Google Cloud. Each speaker will present their approach to facilitating unified commerce, followed by a panel discussion on how retailers are creating unified shopping experiences today, as well as how unified retail solutions will evolve in the future.

Supply chain challenges, unexpected spikes or troughs in demand, and changing customer behaviors all make it hard to ensure that brands and retailers have the right amount of product, in the right place, at the right time. This session will feature four cutting-edge solutions focused on solving the challenges of product, demand forecasting and merchandising. Each company’s Founder/CEO will present their take on industry challenges and opportunities, followed by a group discussion on how product and merchandising roles are changing, and the part that data-driven solutions play in equipping retailers and brands to make smarter decisions.

Boosting efficiencies and reducing waste are key levers for improving profitability, and they also increase speed-to-market and agility. Identifying opportunities to improve, combined with measuring and managing the impact of technology or process improvements, requires a strategic and data-driven approach. This session will feature cutting-edge solutions focused on boosting operational efficiencies for retailers and brands. Each company’s Founder/CEO will present their take on the industry, followed by a group discussion on common areas of waste for retailers and brands, overcoming common challenges in efficiency boosting projects and how to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Meeting new or existing customers authentically where they are is a fundamental challenge for marketers due to increasingly complex and varied customer journeys, with ever-evolving shopper habits and expectations. This session will feature cutting-edge and dynamic marketing and data-focused solutions that help companies reach customers with relevant and engaging creative at all stages of the buying journey. Each company’s Founder/CEO will have five minutes for a brief introduction to themselves and their perspective, followed by a panel conversation on how consumer habits are changing, the marketing challenges retailers and brands face today, and how companies can effectively connect and communicate across channels.

Retailers face a slew of challenges to delivering store experiences that exceed customer expectations. Inconvenient store layouts, uninspiring assortments and displays, challenges around product availability and concerns over staff safety and product security all potentially imperil in-store experience, and drive shoppers to ecommerce alternatives. Leveling up the in-store experience is critical to make for truly great unified commerce experiences. This session will feature a series of conversations with companies leading the charge toward creating a new generation of stores that shoppers love to visit. The audience will hear what defines a winning store experience today, and how executives are designing, executing, scaling and measuring the success of their physical stores.

Barriers to entry for creating a new brand have steadily fallen, while at the same time, barriers to success for challenger brands have never seemed higher. A few characteristics define new, powerhouse brands: a brilliant product with a clear purpose, wide customer awareness, and diverse distribution networks. Powerhouse brands fundamentally disrupt market incumbents, winning and retaining market share while managing acquisition costs to build long-term sustainable businesses. But how are they doing it? In these Track Keynotes, two leaders of powerhouse brands will share the strategic vision and tactical execution that have spurred their growth, and how they have adapted to challenges on their paths to success.

Customer expectations around order fulfillment and delivery are in flux. Where ever-faster delivery was once the sole objective, other factors, including consistency, reliability, customer care, and even sustainability also factor into customer wants and needs. Forward-thinking companies are building or partnering with more agile fulfillment networks to meet these diverse customer expectations. Retailers can now evaluate in real-time whether fulfillment from warehouses, in-store, or other channels makes the most sense. This session will feature fresh insights into fulfilment and delivery models for retailers and brands balancing competitive pressures, customer expectations, and economic imperatives.

Evolving customer journeys and expectations, as well as unpredictable supply chain challenges, have tremendously complicated operations for brands and retailers. Improving supply chain efficiency requires Improved, data-driven inventory planning to ensure that companies have the best possible product mix in their new, smarter supply chains. In this session, a senior leader at a luxury brand will engage in a fireside chat on inventory planning, sharing how they are combining tech and human expertise to avoid the dreaded sold-out sign, or worse, an excess of unsellable products.

The market for AI-powered tech solutions is already worth over $136 billion with estimates that it will grow nearly 40 percent between 2023 and 2030. The explosion of interest in AI, driven largely by generative AI (GenAI), has led to a slew of new startup tech solutions, alongside vendors that have leveraged AI or machine learning for years. Navigating this vibrant landscape is challenging for retailers and brands seeking solutions that address actual business needs. In this rapid-fire session, three investors will share their unfiltered perspectives on the role of AI in retail technology, where it is most likely to be a game-changer, and how they evaluate claims and sort hype from reality and manage "AI fatigue."

Retail success today requires evolving away from complex, monolithic legacy technologies in favor of a tech stack that adapts quickly to changing needs. However, the time and expense of full-scale tech overhauls mean that companies sometimes opt to keep legacy systems long past their best-by date. This session will feature companies that have avoided that trap by taking a strategic, methodical approach to modernizing their tech stack, keeping a focus on the ROI of any new investment. They will share how they have implemented processes to identify, test, deploy, and manage new technologies and tools, ensuring that they prioritize the best technologies to accelerate their businesses toward unified commerce.

Trust and loyalty are built through a complex harmonization of multiple factors, including well-defined and lived brand values, authenticity, price and value for money, quality and availability of products, customer experience, and much more. Although they are among the most valuable intangibles of any brand, trust and loyalty are also among the most easily lost if a brand’s words or actions disappoint its customers. This session will feature two brands that are building deep reservoirs of trust and loyalty, by understanding and catering to their customers’ behaviors, expectations and needs. They’ll share how they are building products, brands, communication strategies, loyalty programs, and more that combine to attract and retain modern shoppers.

In 2023, almost 92% of organizations said that their data analytics investments were delivering real business value. Spurred by that and by the explosion of interest in AI, the race for data-driven competitive advantage is accelerating. Leveraging data analytics and AI across an entire organization requires a well-defined, value-driven, and business-aligned strategy, underpinned by significant financial investment, strong leadership, and cross-functional buy-in. This session will open with a presentation by an expert consultant on a framework for approaching an AI strategy. It will then feature fireside chats with two senior executives who are successfully optimizing people, process and technology to deliver strategic data analytics and AI capabilities that are increasing revenue, improving operational efficiencies and/or driving profitability.

Although specialization and focus are key for large, complex organizations to operate efficiently, delivering impactful transformation requires that retail and brand leaders win cross-functional buy-in, drive collaboration, and incentivize disparate teams towards a common goal. To succeed at unified commerce for shoppers, retailers and brands must be unified internally. In this series of fireside chats, leaders will share specific examples of how they have navigated organizational complexity and broken down silos to inspire the cross-functional collaboration required to drive digital transformation and unified commerce success.

Delivering truly personalized experiences increases likelihood to purchase. It also potentially increases repeat purchases, as well as loyalty to a retailer or brand. Despite the deluge of data-driven AI-based tools, unlocking personalization is made more difficult by today’s complex customer journeys with multiple touchpoints. As a result, retailers and brands can't always measure, manage, and influence customer behaviors as they might hope to. In this series of presentations, leaders will share specific examples of how they’ve overcome personalization challenges to deliver value to their customers and, in turn, increase lifetime value.

The rapid evolution and adoption of generative AI has inspired a unique combination of excitement and trepidation among executives, and more recently no small amount of fatigue and skepticism. While the technology continues to generate hype, forward-thinking retailers and brands have found the signal in the noise to identify and deploy meaningful, value-driving gen AI applications. In this session, a leading consultant will share a framework for evaluating gen AI applications. He'll be followed by two retail leaders will share specific ways they are deploying gen AI to help their businesses seize opportunities and improve operations.