Making Loyalty Meaningful

How to keep consumers on the line for the long haul amid “points fatigue” (the waning value of discounts-only programmes) was a hot topic. From serving relevance with the support of agentic AI to special access perks and engaging fans in community-centred membership schemes as active participants, we unpack loyalty experts’ strategic advice.

AI Frontiers: R&D, Marketing & Anthropomorphised Advisors

Other speakers discussed new-gen AI (generative, agentic, computer vision) for elevating retail service, marketing and research. Key topics included tools simultaneously encompassing positive and negative tasks (ensuring one brand mission doesn’t hamper another goal), hyper-personalised adverts, in-store insights, anthropomorphic associates, and creating consumer-opinion mimicking ‘synthetic personas’ for R&D. 

Supercharging Social Media Commerce

Hot debate surrounded how brands can keep pace with social commerce. Key tactics, via brands and social-first agency strategists, included agile ‘moment marketing’ (over traditional long-range calendar scheduling), staff-made user-generated content (UGC), edutainment wins, and revising social-media success metrics (‘shares’ and ‘comment quality’ versus likes).

Modern Missions: New-Gen Purpose & The Access Economy

Other sessions riffed on the changing role of retail, contemporary consumption and the new service modalities this may spur. Key directions include what it means to be a purpose-led brand in 2025 (including why “actionism” now trumps activism), driving hype with post-purchase care culture, the access economy, and reimagining the mall experience.

New Era Search

Sat against a predicted 25% decline in traditional search engine volume by 2026 (Gartner, 2024) due to the rise of social media searches and AI assistants, other key conversations foregrounded the future of search/discovery. Key topics included Gen Z’s social search preferences, visual and multimodal discovery, and speculative ‘sans-website’ futures.