As 2025 approaches, the retail industry is undergoing transformative shifts. Consumers now demand more than convenience—whether shopping in-store or through e-commerce marketplaces, they expect hyper-personalized experiences, authenticity, and accountability.
Personalization has been a buzzword for years; according to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect personalized experiences and offers. Nearly half a decade into the post-COVID era, the enduring need for connection has reshaped consumer expectations. Today’s shoppers search for genuine relationships with brands, meaningful interactions, and experiences that align with their lifestyles.
In 2025, we see retail trends evolving to meet this demand, with businesses prioritizing authentic connections and innovative engagement opportunities. From sustainability to storytelling, this article dives deep into the top retail marketing trends for 2025 with real-world examples and actionable insights.
Brevo’s trend predictions for retail marketing in 2025
1. Sustainability as a driving force
Ensuring sustainable marketing practices shouldn’t just be a box to tick for your corporate responsibility reports. Consumers crave sustainable shopping options from their favorite brands, and 62% of Gen Z shoppers prefer sustainable brands.
Second-hand fashion is taking the retail world by storm: the secondhand clothing market in the U.S. grew 7x faster than the overall retail clothing market in 2023. Depop, a social commerce giant that enables users to buy and sell pre-loved items, reported over $63 million in revenue in 2023, with a community of 35 million registered users.
What does this mean for your marketing strategies?
It means that customers will respond well to genuine sustainability efforts.
Reformation has cultivated a cult following among sustainable fashion enthusiasts. But the brand doesn’t just market sustainability; it embodies it through rigorous reporting, carbon neutrality, and a commitment to circularity across every part of its business model. The business case for sustainability is clear. Reformation achieved $350 million in revenue by 2023.

The takeaway? Audiences respond positively when brands align their messaging with authentic, impactful action. Instill sustainability into the core of your marketing. Ensure your communication is transparent and actionable, as conscious consumers are quick to separate genuine efforts from greenwashing.
Determine the environmental impact of your email activities. Brevo’s Carbon Footprint Report calculates the CO₂ equivalent emissions produced for each email and multiplies them by the total number of campaign and transactional emails sent. This emission data is computed monthly to provide your annual carbon footprint.
Further reading: Brevo's Guide to Sustainable Email Marketing Practices.
2. The rise of community-driven marketing
In the post-lockdown era, individuals increasingly seek community connections over isolation, prompting brands to adopt community-focused marketing strategies. Notably, 80% of marketers report that building brand communities has increased traffic. Rather than targeting the masses, successful retailers are doubling down on niche communities, fostering intimacy and engagement.
The run club effect
Brands are breaking into these “third spaces” to engage customers in new, innovative ways. These might be places like supper clubs, book clubs, or, most fondly, run clubs.
Run clubs have become increasingly popular and even notorious spaces for romantic meet-cutes. Adidas has capitalized on this trend through its Adidas Runners program, offering members exclusive events, parties, and gamified point-scoring systems. These initiatives create positive spaces for individuals to connect under the brand's banner, fostering deeper brand loyalty.
What does this mean for your marketing strategies?
The key takeaway is the value of specificity. Digging into niche, highly engaged customer groups and tailoring your marketing efforts to them streamlines your budget and builds a loyal base of high-value customers who champion your brand.
Brevo’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) consolidates data from multiple sources into detailed customer profiles. These profiles are then accessible to other marketing and analytics tools for segmentation, scoring, analysis, and targeted marketing campaigns. This is how you can tap into these niche communities, harnessing a mass of data and determining precise segments of high-value customers.
Further reading: The Power of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
3. Social shopping beyond influencers
Social platforms have become integral to the retail journey, often serving as search engines where consumers look for recommendations, advice, and inspiration. At the same time, people are experiencing influencer fatigue, where overly polished, sponsored posts lose credibility. So, how can brands break through the noise? By focusing on user-generated content (UGC) and employee-generated content (EGC).
Clear data support this shift: In 2024, global revenues from social media platforms are forecast to reach nearly 700 billion U.S. dollars.
Unconventional influencing
Footasylum created Locked In, a Big Brother-style series on YouTube. The series features UK influencers competing in challenges, living together in a house, and showcasing their personalities in an unpolished, entertaining way. Instead of traditional influencer campaigns, the show incorporates product placements in the background, like branded shoe boxes in interview rooms and contestants wearing Footasylum outfits. This approach taps into the power of storytelling and entertainment to drip-feed products in a memorable context.
The results? Locked In has become a massive hit and has significantly boosted Footasylums' brand visibility and sales. The fourth season alone garnered an impressive 37 million views and generated over two billion impressions across platforms.
What does this mean for your marketing strategy?
Prioritize authenticity by leveraging UGC and EGC. These formats build trust and showcase real-world uses of your products in an organic, relatable way. Move beyond traditional influencers by experimenting with creative formats, such as collaborations with micro-influencers or reality-style content that emphasizes entertainment and storytelling.
4. Reinvented loyalty programs
In a cost-conscious climate, customers are shifting their loyalty expectations. Traditional points-based systems focused on spending are insufficient. Consumers now prefer loyalty programs that align with their values, foster emotional connections, and reward engagement and community participation.
Kiki World is revolutionizing loyalty with its blockchain-based rewards system, setting itself apart from traditional, transaction-focused programs. Instead of earning points solely through purchases, Kiki World rewards customers for diverse activities like posting on social media, sharing feedback, and engaging in brand-hosted events, both online and in-person.

Gamification
Gamification is becoming a powerful tool for this reinvention. By applying game-like mechanics such as challenges, achievements, and leaderboards, brands can make loyalty programs more interactive and enjoyable. Gamification taps into the psychology of accomplishment and competition, encouraging sustained participation. It transforms earning rewards into an engaging experience rather than a transactional process.
The North Face's XPLR Pass Loyalty Program takes engagement to the next level by rewarding customers not just for purchases but for embracing outdoor adventures. Members earn points for activities like checking in at national parks or monuments, blending loyalty with the brand’s adventurous ethos. This gamified approach transforms the program into an interactive experience, deepening customer connections and turning exploration into a rewarding journey.
What does this mean for your marketing strategy?
A 5% increase in customer loyalty can boost profits by 25% to 95%. By offering non-monetary rewards that align with customer values—like convenience, exclusivity, and community connection—brands can foster emotional loyalty and customer satisfaction and attract high-quality customers.
Brevo’s Loyalty Platform simplifies the creation and management of loyalty programs. It enables easy setup of earning rules, rewards, tiers, and automated segmentation, with real-time tracking and reporting to drive customer engagement and retention.
Further reading:
- Decoding Loyalty Programs - Brevo’s key insights to building loyalty programs that strengthen customer connections.
- Loyalty Benchmark Report - insights from over 250 customers on trends and best practices in loyalty program usage.
5. Hyper-localized marketing
In 2024 alone, we’ve seen brands excel by tapping into cultural moments like “Brat Summer” or the total fanfare surrounding the new Wicked movie. Jumping onto trends requires agility and a hyper-localized approach—one that tailors your strategy not just to location but to the cultural and social moments your customers are immersed in. By combining real-time trend-jacking and location-based targeting, you can create personalized and contextually relevant campaigns both online and in physical stores.
Trend-jacking
You don’t have to jump on every viral moment that floods social media—but picking the right ones can significantly boost your brand's visibility, reach, and relatability. For example, Spotify Wrapped send users personalized listening summaries every year, and these are widely shared on social media and dominate our feed.
Even brands unrelated to music are tapping into this trend. Who Gives A Crap, a toilet paper company, put a humorous spin on the Wrapped format. It’s not about copying every viral moment but thoughtfully aligning your brand with the right trends to maximize impact.
Geofencing
Geofencing technology enables businesses to target consumers based on their exact location. For example, retailers can send push notifications offering discounts as customers approach their stores. Brevo’s Mobile Wallet has geo-fencing capabilities that hold enormous potential for brands that need to get a (customer’s) foot in the door.
Sephora uses geofencing to send tailored offers and reminders to app users when they’re near a store. This drives foot traffic and ensures a seamless omnichannel experience, connecting the digital and physical shopping journey.

Captain Wallet by Brevo Client
What does this mean for your marketing strategy?
A robust omnichannel marketing strategy is essential to keep up with the fluidity of trends and customer preferences. This approach ensures your brand is present across all touchpoints—email, SMS, push notifications, and mobile wallet—allowing for consistent messaging and seamless customer experiences.
Further reading: Mobile Marketing: A Catalyst for Growth
6. Technology-driven retail shift
Advancements in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are changing how consumers shop, offering more interactive and immersive experiences that bridge the gap between online and in-store interactions. While these technologies might not yet be feasible for all businesses due to cost or complexity, they highlight a broader trend: technology is reshaping the retail landscape.
AR and VR demonstrate how innovative technologies can solve traditional retail challenges:
- Decision uncertainty: AR tools like the IKEA Place mobile app allow customers to visualize products in their own environments with life-size 3D representations. This functionality reduces uncertainty and increases purchase confidence. AR tools like this can increase purchase likelihood by 61%, as customers make better-informed decisions, reducing returns and improving satisfaction.
- Enhancing the experience: By merging utility with entertainment, these technologies elevate the shopping journey, creating personalized experiences that retain customer interest and loyalty.

What does this mean for your marketing strategy?
Brands don’t necessarily need to implement AR or VR directly to harness the benefits of tech-driven trends. The real opportunity lies in leveraging emerging technologies to deliver personalized and efficient marketing strategies that meet customers where they are—online, in-store, or both.
While Brevo doesn’t offer AR or VR, it empowers brands to optimize their marketing through advanced AI-driven tools that enhance personalization, timing, and targeting:
- Send-at-best-time: Brevo's AI analyzes user behavior and email history to deliver emails at optimal times for each subscriber, boosting open rates and engagement.
- Segment AI: Simplify audience targeting by generating precise segmentation queries tailored to your business goals, or let Brevo suggest ideal segments based on data insights.
7. Sensory Marketing
Our senses play a decisive role in purchase decisions. For brick-and-mortar retailers, this is easier to leverage, as customers can touch, smell, and interact with products in-store. This is harder to tap into for online stores and digital marketing campaigns. A growing trend is sensory marketing, engaging consumers’ senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell—to create emotionally charged and memorable experiences.
Rhode Skin, a beauty and skincare brand, has creatively leveraged food imagery to evoke sensory connections in digital campaigns, linking products to familiar tastes and aromas that trigger emotional responses. This approach connects skincare to feelings of nourishment and self-care while creating visually stunning and shareable content. The food imagery makes the products feel tangible and emotionally appealing, even in a digital setting.
While the brand’s success is often attributed to the strong fandom of its founder, Hailey Bieber, rhode's sensory content has undeniably played a key role, capturing attention and hearts online and generating significant virality across social media platforms.
What does this mean for your marketing strategy?
Brands looking to integrate sensory marketing into their campaigns can amplify its impact by pairing it with omnichannel marketing strategies. If you want to engage the senses online, ensure this kind of content is reachable on the right channel for your customer.
8. Storytelling and serialized marketing
Modern marketing increasingly taps into the psychology behind gaming: the allure of immediate gratification and the immersive appeal of world-building. Just as gamers are drawn into the narratives and evolving landscapes of their favorite games, consumers respond to brands that offer them something similar—a dynamic, engaging "brand world" they can explore and participate in.
Serialized marketing sits at the intersection of these ideas. Brands can tap into modern audiences' fast-paced, ever-changing content expectations by creating small, episodic content that teases a larger story. This bite-sized approach keeps attention spans engaged and builds anticipation, inviting customers to return for the next "episode." The satisfaction of following a storyline and becoming part of a brand’s evolving world fosters loyalty and deeper connections.
Small World’s social campaign for Rescue Remedy is a great example. The series is called “Rescuerema,” it consists of episodic videos that take on everyday dramas with the help of Rescue Remedy drops to ease anxiety. This series mimics reality-style TV with a humorous, relatable storyline. Rescue Remedy as a brand is nearly a century old. Yet, this campaign garners significant word-of-mouth (their videos generate millions of views on TikTok), strengthened brand recall, and a new connection with younger audiences.
@rescue_remedy Welcome to the Rescuerama world 🤩 Overthinking again? We got you! Reach for Rescue® Night Spray. New drama every Wednesday! #Rescuerama #EverydayDrama #RescueRemedy #Sleep ♬ original sound - Rescue Remedy®
What does this mean for your marketing strategy?
- Embrace episodic content: Break down campaigns into bite-sized, engaging episodes that leave audiences eager for the next installment.
- Focus on platforms that favor storytelling: Leverage TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, which thrive on serialized, consistent content.
- Maintain continuity: Build a cohesive narrative with consistent tone, style, and recurring themes while allowing for creative surprises.
As attention spans shrink and content consumption grows more fragmented, serialized storytelling gives consumers a reason to keep engaging. When done right, it transforms your brand into an experience that customers actively seek out and invest in.
Conclusion
As we step into 2025, the retail marketing landscape demands a careful balance between innovation and authenticity. Consumers are no longer passive participants; they are active, engaged, and expect brands to reflect their values while delivering tailored, meaningful experiences.
From hyper-personalization to gamified loyalty programs and sensory-rich digital marketing, the retail sector trends highlight a single truth: connection is key. Retailers must adapt to evolving consumer behaviors, embracing new technologies, storytelling formats, and strategies that prioritize emotional resonance and relevance.
While no single trend guarantees success, leveraging these insights collectively offers a roadmap to remain competitive and shape the future of retail. The most successful marketers of 2025 will be those who understand consumer preferences and anticipate their needs, creating experiences that go beyond transactions to foster loyalty and community.