4 Retail Marketing Trends You Can’t Afford To Miss In 2026
How will marketers respond to increased pressure for tighter deadlines and measurable results on multiple channels in the coming year?
It’s that time of year when CMOs and marketing directors worry about how technology will help or harm their efforts to win over customers. (Actually, they worry about this all year long, but December is a good time to ponder the future.) It’s no surprise that artificial intelligence emerges as the most pressing concern heading into 2026.
What should be the focus of retailers when it comes to artificial intelligence?
1. AI-Enabled Personalization
AI is a broad topic that can be overwhelming for marketers trying to manage their own campaigns. But for retailers, the primary focus of using this technology is AI’s potential to improve predictive analytics. This effort involves better targeting, messaging, and customer segmentation.
Personalized, one-to-one marketing has been the holy grail of advertisers since the late 1990s. Before the advent of CRMs, marketers longed for ways to have a personal connection with each customer. They want to know specific needs and buying habits, and be able to offer the right thing at the right time. That requires a mastery of enormous datasets, which is exactly what AI is designed to do.
How can retailers use data and AI in ways that do not violate consumer privacy?
The problem, of course, is the risk that consumers will resent a company’s use of personal data to intrude on their privacy. Target experienced blowback over this in 2002, when it used data modelling to determine whether individual customers were pregnant (and therefore more likely to change their shopping habits).
AI will accelerate the potential for this problem. However, retailers can still use data and AI to their advantage, informing campaigns about which products demographic groups—and even individuals—are most likely to buy. In one case study, AI was successfully used to discover meaningful shopping patterns and to customize promotions accordingly.
2. Smarter Print Marketing
As we noted last year, print marketing is very much alive and well. Catalogs and circulars are continuing to evolve. Printed materials are no longer static entities, but are becoming more dynamic, personalized deal engines, thanks to several factors:
- Real-time product data can be managed by integrated PIM, DAM, and dynamic layout automation systems, eliminating manual processes and costly errors, and enabling data updates even at the last minute.
- Mobile-enabled print content (e.g., QR codes in the DAM system) enables smart device users to access deals and purchase products directly.
- Versioning at scale allows retailers to create multiple versions of printed materials, tailoring each campaign’s product offerings by region, demographics, and even individual customers. And to remain cost-effective, it must do so automatically.
3. Multichannel Consistency
While print campaigns still have enormous value, retail CMOs, marketing directors, and their design and production teams must also create parallel campaign content for their websites, e-commerce portals, social media feeds, and, of course, their mobile shopping apps.
How can retailers create a unified customer experience across multiple channels?
To feed this ever-expanding number of channels and create a unified customer experience across them, retailers must employ a “design once & publish everywhere” approach. This type of approach means that the design and production effort for one
channel, such as a printed catalog, must be captured and repurposed for other channels with minimal additional effort.
This was the case with Comosoft’s solution for the Lowe’s home improvement chain. LAGO’s digital production features allow designers to add web- and mobile-specific overlays, hotspots, and other elements to a layout, which are then exported automatically as XML and JPEG/PDF for mobile apps and other digital channels. Pricing, product descriptions, and images are thus kept consistent for each channel.
4. Collaboration Is Key
The pace and frequency of marketing campaigns are accelerating exponentially. Today’s customers also expect instant answers, no matter which channel they use, and can easily turn to a competitor if that need is not met. As a result, the time-to-market window for any campaign is critical.
To meet these information and scheduling demands, it is more important than ever for retail marketing production teams to use systems that eliminate or reduce redundant manual steps.
How can marketers and advertisers meet the information demands of today’s consumers?
These include:
- Offer planning – Marketing directors, individual product marketing leads, and other stakeholders should have a common, visual reference point for planning and tracking each offer, such as LAGO’s whiteboarding and other collaborative workflow
- Proofing and approvals – Rather than relying on physical proofs and markups, marketing stakeholders need to use a well-managed, online proofing and approval process that communicates change requests instantly, notifies the appropriate decision maker, and ensures accountability.
Retail competition in 2026 is shaping up to be even more intense than this year if you can imagine it. New media and AI technology are pushing marketers to be smarter, more agile, and better connected in planning, producing, and delivering complex, multichannel campaigns. Fortunately, that same technology can offer retailers the automation and centralized data management needed to meet these formidable challenges.
Are you ready to future-proof your retail marketing strategy? Schedule a demo to learn how Comosoft LAGO helps you move faster, stay consistent, and scale across every channel in 2026.
