If you feel like 2025 has started at warp speed, you are not alone. Add to that some devastating tragedies in America and that was just January. Putting causes aside, it collectively signals the need for change. The need for innovation, and the need for Leadership (capital L!)
If you attended CES in Las Vegas or the NRF Retail Big Show in New York last month (like I did), you are probably still catching your breath. Marketers today live in a world changing at a head-spinning pace, and at the same time need to engage in some serious plate-spinning – balancing products, comms, channels, stakeholders, technologies, experiences (digital and otherwise) and much, much more.
So how do you “keep calm and carry on,” to quote the well know British slogan? After spending time reflecting in January, I have six purposefully simple thoughts on what will matter most to marketers in 2025 and beyond:
1. Strip away the buzzwords – our ultimate task as marketers is to sell stuff.
Yes, we are in the “Agentic AI Era”, where AI agents become “digital labor” for consumers, brands and retailers. But how will the application of AI or AI agents help me better satisfy consumers and move more stock?
2. Stay focused on the consumer and the Customer Experience.
As I wrote 12 months ago in Forbes, “The Consumer IS the product”. To that point, I loved this quote from a Vitamin Shoppe exec at NRF – “we don’t have an AI strategy; we have a strategy to create better experiences for our customers and make our store folks’ jobs easier. If AI can help with that, then awesome.” Amen.
3. Balance Creativity + Technology
It’s easy to be seduced by technology as the only game in town, and that creativity must be relegated to a distant second (or churned out by AI). My experience – outlined as a thesis at “Conversations in Commerce” at NRF – is that creativity and technology should not be in tension but in tandem. Technology is not just an enabler; it’s the canvas on which creativity flourishes in marketing. And this isn’t “agency speak”. As reported in creative agency, VML’s extensive “Tomorrow’s Commerce 2025” study: “consumers crave engaging and entertaining experiences, not just frictionless transactions.”
4. More balancing acts to consider
Brand + Conversion – today all brand work should facilitate a product or service transaction, and all conversion opportunities should build brand. The art is in making conversion-led work both clever and culturally connected.
Physical + Digital – forget the “blurring of boundaries”; as explored at NRF, we are in an era of “blended brand and retail”, a more dynamic mix of the physical and digital realms. That will include robotics. As Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said at CES, “the ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner.”
Humanity + Technology – in the just-released VML Future 100 study, trend #39 is “Made By Humans”. “Ultimately,” the report states, “despite advances in tech, creativity centers around humans—76% of people firmly believe technology will never take creativity away from humanity.” “People power” was a strong theme coming through in both big shows in January. Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian believes “people are at the heart of every business” and Consumer Technology Association (CTA) CEO and vice chair Gary Shapiro acknowledges “technology is only as powerful as the people around it.”
5. Omnichannel v Optichannel
As I explained post the World Retail Congress last year, “we’ve started to interpret omnichannel as marketers needing to do it all.” That is neither advisable nor possible. Instead, we need to think about optichannel – optimizing around the channels that make the most sense, based around your target, your objectives, and of course, your budget.
6. You might be coach or quarterback, but this is a team sport
Sure, you might be calling – or executing – the plays, but no one person can possibly have the bandwidth today to be across everything. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate – with your team, your colleagues, your agency, your tech partners. Breaking down the walls is fundamental to the future of marketing.
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that transformation can happen faster than we ever imagined. The challenge now is to stay focused on what matters most. So, take my list above, edit it to suit yourself, and keep it as your guiding star.
That leads me to my word for 2025: CARE. Add it to any of the above and they become better. Execute any AI strategy without CARE and you’re heading for disaster. Move too quickly as a leader, and something detrimental will be missing. My greatest input and output will be CARE.