Introduction

Coresight Research is a research partner of Shoptalk Spring 2025, which took place during March 25–27 at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas, Nevada. Shoptalk Spring is an annual conference that unites executives from retailers, consumer-facing brands and technology vendors across physical stores and e-commerce to discuss the latest trends, innovations and challenges in the industry.

In this report, we present highlights from the third (and final) day of the conference. Our insights in this report are categorized under four of the five major themes we have explored through our overall coverage of Shoptalk Spring, listed below. These themes align with Coresight Research’s predictions for retail in 2025 and beyond.

1. Leading with Unified Commerce and Superior Customer Experiences—Customer hospitality involves unlocking unified commerce, creating welcoming retail experiences and fostering customer loyalty.
2. Creating Value to Succeed in a Crowded Market and Cater to Niche Markets—Today, every retail touchpoint, both online and offline, can be used to build brand storytelling and increase engagement, enabling brands and retailers to communicate the authenticity and clarity that consumers demand.
3. Inspiring Shoppers with Next-Generation Search and GenAI (Generative Artificial Intelligence)—The traditional search box has been a staple of e-commerce, remaining simple and consistent. However, large language models (LLMs) and chatbots powered by GenAI are now reimagining the ways in which consumers find digital and physical offerings.
4. Enhancing Productivity and Engagement with Advanced Technology—Emerging technologies present huge potential for retail companies to reduce inefficiencies, drive growth, and enhance the shopping experience by better understanding their customers.
5. Innovating the Future of Marketing, Including Through Retail Media—Retail media is reshaping how marketers communicate with customers and is providing retailers with a robust new revenue stream. Brand marketers are also reshaping their strategies as new media creates new modes of storytelling, with consumers’ attention spans shifting and fragmenting.

Shoptalk Spring 2025, Day Three: Coresight Research Insights

1. Leading with Unified Commerce and Superior Customer Experiences

Human Capital

In the session, “Restructuring Digital Teams for a World of Unified Commerce,” retail executives explored the value of human capital and the effect of technology transitions and installations, which are often underestimated by enterprises. In particular, the explosion in interest and use of AI (artificial intelligence) technology requires companies to educate and train employees, which improves their personal value and the value they provide to the enterprise.

Mandeep Bhatia, SVP of Global Digital Product and Omnichannel Innovation at fashion holding company Tapestry, stated, “Teams with AI will beat teams without AI,” estimating that AI could contribute 20%–30% to efficiency goals. However, he believes that enterprises must express empathy with employees and create communities where it is safe to learn and experiment. Sabrina Cherubini, SVP of Brand & Digital at underwear brand Hanky Panky, agreed that there is a need for empathy, but she also said that managers need to be able to have frank conversations with team members, especially regarding essential skills. Upskilling employees is difficult; it is not enough for HR just to send employees a video to watch, Cherubini stressed. She suggested that curiosity and agency are the key skills that people need.

Concluding the session, Vivian Chang, VP of E-Commerce at health and nutrition company GNC, highlighted corporate challenges in achieving team upscaling in unified commerce: generational changes, the need for succession planning and employees’ individual growth paths.

Left to right: Cherubini; Bhatia; Chang; Valerie de Charette, Partner, TOMORROW (Interviewer)
Source: Shoptalk

 

2. Creating Value to Succeed in a Crowded Market and Cater to Niche Markets

Community-Oriented Brand Building

In one of the first keynotes of the day, Adeela Hussain Johnson, CEO of travel gear and accessories brand BÉIS, explained that the brand’s story centers on knowing its customer deeply and responding with targeted innovation, underscoring how a brand can break through in a saturated market.

Describing BÉIS as a “very community-oriented brand,” Hussain Johnson explained that the company’s core demographic is 24–45-year-old females, who it keeps in close contact with. “We ask consumers what they want. We talk to our consumers a lot,” she said.  The brand is also steadily engaging with new cohorts, including older shoppers and men. Hussain Johnson said that the company’s  ongoing dialogue with shoppers fuels new product ideas and helps BÉIS deliver moments of “I didn’t even know I needed that but now I can’t live without it.” The driving force behind these moves is BÉIS’s commitment to stay “experience-led” and authentic.

BÉIS relies heavily on paid channels to drive engagement, with Hussain Johnson pointing to Instagram and other social platforms as a “big place” to build community. She also revealed that diversification of risk is a big focus for the company, so it is working across multiple channels and is developing unique content for each channel. “For instance, when we show up in real life, we want it to be a great experience,” she said.

In the modern retail environment, brands and retailers must work to meet customers wherever they are but ensure that each interaction reinforces their core values and brand identity. Hussain Johnson’s comments also echo the emphasis on consumer-centricity that we have heard multiple times  from brands at Shoptalk Spring this year as they focus on ensuring relevance and product resonance.

Hussain Johnson discusses brand values and community building
Source: Shoptalk

 

Earning Loyalty

In a keynote on “Defining and Earning Loyalty in a Crowded Retail Environment,” Jon Blotner, President of Commercial and Operations at furniture retailer Wayfair, stated that, even outside of its loyalty program, his company is looking to make sure that every interaction with customers is a way to build loyalty. By taking this approach, loyalty permeates the entire customer experience, from online search to in-store product discovery. Via its feature-rich Wayfair Rewards program, the company offers 5% cash back, free shipping on any order and an exclusive customer service line. “We wanted to make it a no-brainer to shop at Wayfair,” Blotner said. Through such loyalty incentives, Wayfair aims to deepen consumer trust and drive repeat purchases. In addition, Blotner pointed to the company’s new physical stores as cementing loyalty by letting shoppers see and feel products before buying.

Blotner highlights opportunities to build loyalty through the entire customer journey
Source: Shoptalk

 

Following Wayfair’s keynote, a panel discussion on the same topic saw executives from footwear retailer DSW and home-improvement chain Lowe’s echo the importance of meaningful loyalty. Sarah Crockett, Chief Marketing Officer at DSW, reminded the Shoptalk audience that “emotional tactics” carry more weight than mere transactional perks. Both brands prioritize in-depth consumer knowledge to avoid the “sea of sameness.” Amanda Bailey, VP of Customer Marketing and Loyalty at Lowe’s, added: “Know your customers and focus on what they want. It can’t just be a marketing exercise; it needs to be something that brings value to customers.”

Bailey discusses the need to deliver value in loyalty programs
Source: Shoptalk

 

Both DSW and Lowe’s are focused on the metrics that prove a program’s real value: retention rates, repeat shopping rates and direct traffic. According to Bailey, Lowe’s is “laser-focused on frequency… How do we drive that ‘one more trip?’” She also asserted that data is no longer a “nice to have; it is imperative” in regard to loyalty. Retailers should use data to gather insights and drive activations. Agreeing, Crockett said, “data is a fast track to personalization”—a topic that has emerged in many conversations at Shoptalk Spring this year. Personalization—amplified by the growth of AI and GenAI—is the next frontier of loyalty, allowing brands to deliver relevant, relationship-building experiences at scale, which Coresight Research has been covering for some time.

Crockett points to personalization as the future of loyalty
Source: Shoptalk

 

Optimizing for Gen Z

Luxury brand Coach’s emphasis on “expressive luxury”—a term it coined in 2022 as it repositioned away from “accessible”—showcases how a heritage brand can reinvigorate its image to resonate with Gen Zers’ desire for inclusivity and experiential retail. The company completed extensive research, ranging from focus groups to store visits alongside actual customers, which revealed that “Gen Z does not see channel; they see brand,” according to Leigh Manheim Levine, President of North America at Coach. These insights pushed Coach to refine its physical stores and hire younger associates, so the in-store experience feels more relevant. This approach exemplifies the ongoing move toward channel-agnostic customer journeys across the retail space (aligning with our “unified commerce” theme through our coverage of Shoptalk Spring) as well as underscoring the broader shift toward offering value through immersive, emotion-driven environments.

Manheim Levine discusses Coach’s “expressive luxury” strategy to target Gen Z shoppers
Source: Shoptalk

 

Extending this perspective, Kevin Kelley, Principal and Co-Founder of architecture and design firm Shook Kelley, described the need for retail to deliver “bonfire moments,” which he described as moments that bring people together in “mystical ways.” Kelley believes that physical stores should leverage community and make customers feel as though they are connected not just to the store but to the community at large. By connecting physical spaces to genuine human memories—whether through nostalgic theming or local storytelling—retailers can differentiate themselves and spark deeper emotional ties. Shoppers increasingly expect stores to reveal what brands truly care about, which means that aligning store design with a company’s core values can set the stage for both immediate engagement and lasting brand affinity.

Kelley explains the importance of “bonfire moments” in physical retail
Source: Shoptalk

 

3. Inspiring with Next-Generation Search and GenAI

Contextual and Visual Search

In his keynote on adapting to shifting consumer behavior, Sean Scott, VP and GM of Consumer Shopping at Google, said that shopping behavior has changed permanently, becoming “predictably unpredictable,” due to four factors: streaming, scrolling, searching and shopping.

Eight of 10 shopping journeys involve multiple touchpoints, according to Scott. Although this creates many opportunities for retailers to influence shopper behavior and engage with consumers, it also generates information overload for consumers. Scott urged retailers to focus on the entire sales funnel amid this multitude of touchpoints, to be “everywhere the customer is.” To guide and assist the consumer and cut through the noise, future technologies for commerce-enabling search will need to be assistive and highly personalized, he said.

Scott lauded the upgraded Google Shopping platform, giving the example that it can handle a search for “men’s jeans for a Shoptalk keynote.” This term would never be included in any tagging scheme or database, showcasing that the platform can now handle contextual, natural-language search.

Visual search is also an extremely powerful search method for consumers. Google Lens can initiate a search from a photo, and the AI (artificial intelligence)-powered “Circle to Search” function on Android-powered smartphones enables consumers to launch a search from a screenshot. One example Scott gave was a search for a planter sitting on a table, which would be challenging to describe in text yet extremely straightforward with a photo. He also made the claim that YouTube is the number-one choice for consumers seeking product recommendations and product information.

To serve shoppers who are unwilling to wait the couple of days to receive goods via online orders, retailers can upload their inventory into Google’s Merchant Data platform. This makes product available under Local Shopping, where consumers can find products available locally. Scott gave a final, compelling example using multiple technologies: uploading a photo of a part needed when fixing a faucet, which he found through visual search and was able to purchase locally and finish the repair job within an hour.

“Deliver real results with contextualized search” is one of Coresight Research’s 10 recommendations for retail organizations to harness the power of AI in 2025, which aligns with the “Enhance customer experiences” element of our CORE Framework for AI in retail. We expect consumers to lose patience with traditional keyword-based search and increasingly turn to AI-powered search.

Scott emphasizes the power of visual search in enhancing the customer experience
Source: Shoptalk

 

AI for Customer Engagement

The revolutionary new capabilities of GenAI are enabling a new class of business models, many of which leverage the conversational capabilities of language models and ways to engage consumers. The technology is already disrupting search, with relevant context obsoleting traditional tag-based search, and its ability to handle unstructured data enables retailers and brands to quickly respond to consumers and identify important issues in communication with them.

The session, “AI and Data Solutions Enhancing Customer Interactions” featured presentations from four innovative technology companies whose GenAI solutions enable retailers to create new business models and communicate with consumers more effectively:

• Cimulate’s Co-Founder and CTO, Vivek Farias, discussed Customer GPT, which he termed as an LLM-based operating system that improves the customer experience, starting with search. The company also uses LLMs to generate synthetic customer profiles, which align closely with real-world profiles.
• Nectar Social offers an agentic community commerce platform that uses AI to enable disruptor brands to insert themselves into the conversation on social media. The platform identifies social media posts where brands can proactively offer comments, engage consumers via questions, respond rapidly and mine community feedback for content and product improvements, explained Misbah Uraizee, CEO and Founder of Nectar Social.
• Postscript’s “Shopper” solution uses LLMs to engage in conversations via SMS with consumers, which can adapt conversations based on customer replies. Having these one-on-one conversations dramatically increases the conversation rate over ordinary SMS offers, according to Adam Turner, Co-Founder and CEO of Postscript.
• Topsort uses AI to further enhance the monetization of retail media inventory by leveraging retailers’ first-party data, dispelling the notion that the use of AI is expensive, said the company’s Co-Founder and CEO, Regina Ye.

Left to right: Uraizee; Ye; Turner; Farias; Vanessa Larco, Partner, NEA (Interviewer)
Source: Coresight Research

 

4. Innovating the Future of Marketing, Including Through Retail Media

Fans’ Role in Defining Brands

During the “Brands as Conversations: Fans’ Role in Defining Brands” session, speakers illustrated how brands increasingly function as interactive communities, driven by fans’ desire to be heard and experience personal connections with the brands they love.

Rather than simply tracking demographics or reacting to transient trends, retail companies are actively inviting consumers into the brand-development process, bringing fans into the conversation when it comes to what marketing they want to see and how they want to engage with it. For example, Denise Truelove, SVP and GM of PC Marketing at PepsiCo Foods North America, explained that her company brought back the “Doritos Crash the Super Bowl” campaign this year, which allowed fans to create a 30-second ad spot for the Super Bowl. This resulted in a “social community” around the idea of creating the ad. The company selected three finalists, and then fans were allowed to vote on which ad they wanted to see. In addition, the company launched “Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Dill Pickle” as this was the most requested flavor from customer, Trulove said. She described this approach being “fans of our fans.”

Sarah Zurell, Chief Marketing Officer at Chinese Laundry (Cels Brands), also highlighted the creation of personal connections in marketing. “We are always looking to ‘create moments’ where the customers have an emotional response,” she said, offering the example of aspiring to be the people featured in advertising campaigns or connecting with a social post by an influencer that the company is working with.

Brands can also drive true marketing innovation by transforming customer insights and needs into memorable experiences. For instance, PepsiCo’s partnerships that have placed fan interests at the center (such as its Doritos and Stranger Things collaboration) stand in stark contrast to tie-ins that felt “inauthentic,” Truelove said, offering its Lays/Coachella activation as an example of the latter as it was not “in service to the customer.”

Forging genuine bonds requires prioritizing the consumer at every step, ensuring that brand-building and creative content reflect—and amplify—what fans truly value.