The next competitive advantage won’t come from making packaging greener. It will come from making sustainability invisible to the consumer experience.
Retail
McDonald’s wants to turn its restaurants, screens, app and customer relationships into a billion-dollar advertising business. The bigger story for marketers is that retail media is rapidly becoming something much larger than retail.
Rising carrier costs are turning fulfillment into a marketing issue, because the promises brands make before the checkout are increasingly being tested by what happens after it. As holiday volumes rise and shipping becomes more expensive, the winners may be the retailers that treat logistics as part of the customer experience rather than an invisible function sitting behind it.
New data from creator marketing platform Billo illustrates just how quickly the economics of digital advertising shift as the holiday shopping season approaches.
Economic uncertainty has turned Halloween, Back-to-School, and the holiday shopping season into exercises in consumer confidence rather than consumer demand. For marketers, the biggest challenge isn’t convincing people to shop. It’s convincing them that your brand deserves a place in increasingly scrutinized budgets.
Consumers haven’t stopped spending, despite years of inflation and economic uncertainty. They’ve simply become far more selective about what deserves their money, leaving brands stuck in the middle with fewer places to hide.
New research suggests consumers are ready to reward brands that recognize them, yet most marketing still feels generic. The loyalty gap may not be about points or perks, but about the growing disconnect between customer data and customer experience.
Brands have spent decades optimizing how they interrupt consumers. Creator-led commerce is succeeding because it eliminates the interruption altogether, turning trusted voices into the new point of sale and collapsing the distance between discovery, recommendation and purchase.
As In-N-Out Burger expands far beyond its West Coast roots, the company risks discovering a lesson that extends well beyond fast food: growth can increase revenue while quietly diminishing the very uniqueness that created demand in the first place.
Before co-founding California Pizza Kitchen, Rick Rosenfield built his career prosecuting organized crime. He says the habits that won cases in federal court became the same habits that helped build one of America’s most successful restaurant brands—and they’re lessons today’s entrepreneurs shouldn’t ignore.