Unboxing retail: Brands have to smash silos to conquer the new customer frontier

But the brands that will win in the future retail landscape will find new processes, collaboration models, and organizational structures to bring down the silos that marketers have been building for decades.

Whose brand is this?

Let’s start with brands. Legacy companies have built portfolios of brands operating in silos with limited integration and collaboration. Portfolios often suffer from internal competition and media cannibalization, with marketers not knowing how to collaborate. People don’t care about these silos; consumers are unphased by the convergence of different brands and IP (sometimes, they demand it).

We live in a world where KFC-branded Crocs can sell out in 30 minutes, and your Fortnite avatar can destroy a Wendy’s restaurant with a Lightsaber, dressed as Batman. Brands that learn to collaborate within portfolios, across categories, and even with competitors, will win in this new retail landscape. This requires bravery and understanding that ‘your’ brand belongs to culture now.

Personalization and fragmentation

Personalization has been an industry buzzword for a long time, and while dynamic advertising has enabled marketers to speak to customers at the individual level, the retail experience has often failed to deliver on that promise. In other words, the customer gets put back in a box.

And with the growing prominence of ‘headless’ e-commerce and AI, retail is beginning to deliver on that promise of personalization at scale. This is great news for customers. Humans are dynamic; our emotional and rational needs differ and change over time. Marketers who use AI to parse data and learn about their customers at the individual level to deliver personalized commerce experiences will thrive. Connecting the dots across retail channels, enabling the customer to pick up where they left off as they move from the store to the web (and back again) will set the pace.

Silos everywhere

The fragmentation of the media landscape in the internet age created an explosion of specialized roles for channels and marketers. Above-the-line built awareness, social media created engagement, and retail was where you transact. The teams charged with those channels operated largely in silos. Now customers can shop from billboards, influencer posts, or ‘metaverse’ experiences. And anyone who has enjoyed a game of pickup basketball in a Nike store will attest that retail channels have become canvases for brand building.

Marketing channels are more connected than ever. Their roles have changed over time, but teams are still built around them. Marketing organizations need to stop creating teams siloed around channels and encourage true integration across teams. Generalists will be more important than ever, as brands look to create the seamlessly connected experiences. Meanwhile, as AI begins to automate much of the channel-specific activation ‘lever-pulling’, marketers will be able to focus on the bigger picture.

‘Always-on’, forever

Another U-turn that is beginning to take place is the move from ‘always-on’ to campaign-driven marketing. The latter began to replace the former in the mid-20th century, but the timeboxing of moments in a marketing calendar is becoming dated. Brands are competing with culture, not only for attention but also for share-of-wallet. Social media’s Paul brothers have an energy drink empire; Emma Chamberlain’s coffee brand competes with CPG giants; Mr. Beast’s Beast Burger is the hot new fast food brand.

TikTok, meanwhile, is arguably the biggest entertainment platform in the world. Everything is changing quickly in tech and culture, and organizing your marketing calendar around seasons just won’t cut it. Marketers need to be always-on, agile, adaptive, and responsive to culture in real-time.

Easy right? These shifts won’t happen overnight or all at once, but winners will champion an integrated, agile, and adaptive approach. They’ll do away with the boxes we’ve put our teams, time, channels, and customers into. This will require a complete overhaul of internal organizations and structure; how they partner with agencies and talent; how they think about their tech stack and tooling; and how they take risks in response to emerging trends.