Shopping is evolving. In 2024, this will manifest itself in the form of a number of developing primary retail trends.
But this does not worry small businesses. Instead, use them to tell your strategy, and they’ll constitute huge expansion opportunities for stores in 2024.
After a year of low customer confidence in 2023, combining emerging fuel costs and declining customer discretionary income, the year after presented significant challenging situations for retailers. However, a Goldman Sachs report on the UK’s economic forecasts for 2024 predicts that those headwinds and, going forward, peak UK inflation are easing, while customer confidence is slowly rising, which allows retail sectors to be cautiously positive in the near future.
So what does this mean, in particular, for small businesses? While these are global trends, they will hopefully apply to even the smallest startups, meaning business owners deserve to keep an eye on them now and over the next twelve months. .
These are just fashion products. Instead, those retail trends involve adjustments to how consumers shop and how they interact with business owners.
Understanding them (and, by extension, how their consumers will behave in 2024) will be critical to your business over the next year. Keep them in mind when creating your goals, priorities, and business areas. . . otherwise it risks being left in the past.
From AI teams to personalized marketing, these are four of the biggest trends we can expect to shape the retail industry and your business over the next year.
There is no doubt that sustainability is a growing fear among consumers. After all, a McKinsey investigation
But with this increased interest, consumers are also becoming more aware of business practices. Added to this is skepticism: are companies becoming more sustainable and respecting their ecological commitments? Or are corporations simply glossing over their true contribution to the climate?
A Euromonitor 2024 Consumer Trends report shows that consumers “want organizations to step up their efforts and demonstrate evidence of their green commitments,” while a recent Ogilvy influencer trends white paper also reports that “fans are more vigilant, denounce greenwashing and examine claims. of brands and influencers.
In other words, by 2024 consumers will suffer from “green fatigue. ”
While climate mistakes seem to be an urgent factor for consumers around the world, there is an undeniable sense that the potential purchase choices they make would not possibly make a genuine difference in resolving the disruptions in question. More than ever, other people know the enormity of these disorders, and with that comes a greater awareness of true sustainability, as opposed to fake green marketing.
In fact, a report by Mintel found that 60% of consumers think corporations are simply making up their green claims: that they don’t do what big corporations claim about their respect for the environment. Today, it’s no longer enough to perform with less damage to the planet than the competition: shoppers need to shop at outlets that offer genuine weather responses and genuinely strive to be regenerative.
This might seem like more work for your business in 2024, but it can work in favor of small businesses. Independent stores tend to be very aware of the sustainability of their business and, due to their size, could be more hooked. to the sustainability of its daily operations.
The small businesses that will achieve this in 2024 are simply aiming to live up to their green commitments: they are deepening their supply chain and manufacturers, and putting tangible time and effort into ensuring they are working deeply on sustainability.
In turn, corporations will need to recognize that they are not greenwashing, communicate their sustainability measures to consumers, and initiate verbal exchange, thinking about and executing those steps in the process.
That is, the ability to ask a platform like Chat GPT to generate text: a sales newsletter about the brilliance of your latest product launch, for example, or the ability to use a block of text to create a sales email. press or sales.
By 2023, Chat GPT will have become the fastest-growing app in history, with around a hundred million users per month in just two months. To put that in perspective, it took Instagram and Facebook two and a half years to gather the same number of users. This explosion is expected to continue until 2024.
Obviously, consumers have embraced those apps. Now, small businesses want to think about how they can use AI teams to their advantage, as well as respond to the growing awareness of their customers and accept them as true when employing those applications.
This means looking at how stores can use AI to power and process, and balancing that while preserving the human dimension.
As more corporations adopt AI technology, shoppers will also take the lead in human interaction, a domain in which many small businesses excel.
Small businesses can use AI teams in time- and money-saving tactics, such as generating product descriptions, and with teams they probably already use, such as Gmail, Shopify, and Canva, which also incorporate more AI into their apps.
The toughest challenge many small business owners face is a lack of time, money, and energy, so they take a look at AI to find out how it can save them all of that.
On the contrary, smaller stores also think about and highlight spaces in which to offer a human touch as a premium value. By 2024, the sensible use of AI will be about maximizing efficiency, while relying on human interaction.
Simply put, social commerce is where social media facilitates e-commerce; where exploration, decision-making and purchases are positioned on the same social platform.
This means the combination of e-commerce and entertainment. As Amir Kabbara, Chief Product Officer at Shopify, said of its partnership with Spotify: “One of our ideals is for retail to be and we need to help make it ArrayBuyers. . . and enthusiasts are going from listening to music on Spotify to browsing on TikTok.
The theory that shoppers need to be entertained (their social platforms) has already been proven.
Influencer Marketing Hub’s report, “The State of Social Shopping in 2024,” shows that 98% of consumers plan to use social grocery shopping at least once this year, a significant increase from 68%. buyers from last year.
Or, as Saatchi summarized
For small businesses, this means adopting features like live food shopping on social media, one of the fastest-growing social commerce spaces (and e-commerce as a whole).
In the same way, it presents opportunities for content creators on those platforms: a booming market, but still an untapped field. What do you mean? Estimates recommend that only 2% of people who create content can make it their only income. . . which means that 98% of users who create entertaining and engaging content have yet to take advantage of monetization of their work.
In 2024, social commerce and author economies will provide a better symbiotic relationship, with consumers who need to be entertained and users who create content to entertain them. Likewise, studies show that 37% of consumers believe in influencers more than brands.
This leaves small businesses with two big opportunities for growth: adapting content creators for social commerce and partnering with creators who are already building relationships with their target visitors. Next year, it’s going to be as much about paid advertising as it will be about authentic moments. of emotion that the visitor needs to see, which end with a “commercial moment”.
Forget about the general reach on social media: In 2024, corporations will adopt a personalized engagement with their customers.
Research shows that 91% of consumers surveyed receive text messages from brands they love, and WhatsApp marketing also achieves open rates of between 98% and 99%.
This trend is accompanied by chatbot marketing, which has grown from a £1 billion market in 2023 to £1. 2 billion in 2024 and is expected to be worth £4. 9 billion by 2032. How can they Companies use AI to automate service queries to visitors and interact with them? The visitor?
This type of communication aims for businesses to connect individually with their unwavering consumers, without having to post general messages about special offers, for example, on social media.
Here, the personalized touch is key. Users need messages that are tailored to their shopping habits and their shopping habits in order to be bombarded with general marketing messages.
In the coming year, small businesses will not only need to look at their sustainability and reaffirm their commitment to it, but also make sure they communicate those concrete moves to their customers. Businesses will also harness the power of AI and know where you can take advantage of your valuable time. be stored with that equipment, but also taking into account the human communication that small businesses can boast of. This personalized communication is essential: combine it with social commerce and stores will be in a position to succeed by 2024. . . and beyond.