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Retail in the Age of The Human Dividend

Trend Three 

The Stakeholder Customer  

The era of passive consumption will come to end as empowered consumers and communities increasingly demand to be treated like active stakeholders by brands – entrusted to direct and rewarded for their input – providing a personal and commercial contribution to the products and services that they buy. By 2030, the era of passive consumption will be over, with brands and retailers expecting consumers to contribute personally to and be involved in the products and services they buy.

Trend TWO 

Community Commerce  

A growing consumer need for community, coupled with a strong desire to support local communities post-COVID, will increasingly inform physical retail spaces where human connection and collaboration is the key enticement. In addition to being a seamless feature of ‘hybrid operations’, physical stores will need to offer compelling local, experiential and leisure-related incentives to survive and thrive in 2030.

Trend one 

Human is Premium

As retail automation increases, real human service and skills will be increasingly positioned and sold as a premium product or service proposition to consumers – requiring retailers to rethink how to humanise both physical and virtual touchpoints. By 2030, customer-facing retail employees will champion brand storytelling and curation, providing individualised — and crucially, empathetic — advice and expertise in-store.

The Human Dividend

Macro theme FOUR

Retail in the age of

Trend TWO 

Community Commerce  

A growing consumer need for community, coupled with a strong desire to support local communities post-COVID, will increasingly inform physical retail spaces where human connection and collaboration is the key enticement. In addition to being a seamless feature of ‘hybrid operations’, physical stores will need to offer compelling local, experiential and leisure-related incentives to survive and thrive in 2030.

Macro theme FOUR

The Human Dividend

Trend one 

Human is Premium

As retail automation increases, real human service and skills will be increasingly positioned and sold as a premium product or service proposition to consumers – requiring retailers to rethink how to humanise both physical and virtual touchpoints. By 2030, customer-facing retail employees will champion brand storytelling and curation, providing individualised — and crucially, empathetic — advice and expertise in-store.

Trend Three 

The Stakeholder Customer  

By 2030, appealing to emotion will become an even more powerful way of asserting truth than objectivity or rationale/critical thinking.

Fuelled by social media and the development of AI-generated deepfakes, the blurred lines between fact and fiction will make many consumers more inclined to go with their gut and prioritise emotional responses in decision-making.

This complex terrain will make it increasingly important for brands to focus on transparency to substantiate any claim they make about their products or services, as well as providing novelty.

Download Chapter Four to find out more