Rather than telling you what I think the big trends are, I’m going to pose some big questions and ask you all to let me know your answers. Below are a few questions I’m mulling over and, therefore, assume many of you will be as well. I’m hoping that posing them here will spark some interesting discussions, and maybe even lead to answers we can share through follow-up articles throughout the year. That said, here they are:

How can retailers appeal to both human and technological audiences

One of my pet hates is finding a recipe that looks good, then scrolling through the author’s entire life story before getting to the actual steps. As a marketer and MarTech researcher, I understand this helps SEO. But as a consumer, let’s all agree it’s a horrible experience.

This is one example of having to appeal to multiple audiences: the person looking for a recipe, and the search engine choosing whether to show it or not. Now add AI-powered search modes and consumer shopping agents. Brands have another audience to appeal to, and if we thought SEO algorithms were complex, AI models are (at least currently) an opaque black box.

So how do retailers balance rankings on search results, getting recommended by AI summaries or agents, and having something human shoppers want to see? I’ve been talking to Shane Duggan from Thinkerbell a lot about this topic recently, and we’ll have research on it coming out this year. For now, this dilemma draws me back to core concepts we teach in Consumer Behaviour. We’ve long understood the dynamics of buying groups and the various roles within them. In a family shopping for toys, brands must appeal both to the kids who want them, and the parents who may or may not buy them. Each audience wants something different; kids want fun, parents might want some educational value or at least something that won’t break in a few minutes.

Are we now seeing a tech-based extension of this idea? Will retailers and brands have to develop different content for the human shopper, separate from the search engine, and then separate again from AI shopping agents? The answer isn’t clear, but coming from a consumer psych and CX background, I’ll urge this: don’t forget about the humans on the other side. Because no one wants to wade through a whole bunch of SEO- or AI-tailored content before being able to buy a product they urgently need.

Will we finally see brands adopting profitable Black Friday strategies

I’ve written about the paradoxes of ‘mega-sales’ like BFCM many times for Inside Retail, based on research Dr Jessica Pallant, Associate Professor John Hopkins and I did speaking directly to retailers. It turns out when you get retail leaders alone and under confidentiality agreements, they’ll tell you they don’t really like participating in these sales. They know it’s not profitable but do it either because their competitors are, or because their senior execs are focused on short-term revenue over long-term profitability. Yet, every year these same retailers invest more in these sales, start them earlier and offer bigger discounts. It’s a race to the bottom, and many retailers know it. As one very senior industry and association leader summarised, “Retailers have f-ed it for ourselves”. (I censored this; they didn’t…)

Carla Penn-Kahn has many great posts summarising the profitability issue of these mega discounts with detailed breakdowns of margins and costs. Basically, it boils down to this: if you’re spending more on advertising during a busy period, to attract a purchase with a large discount, you’re probably losing money on it.

One argument for these sales that we heard is that they are more like an advertising expense: the loss on the sale is the cost of acquiring a new customer. Maybe that’s so, but are customers acquired with large discounts actually profitable long term? Do they come back and buy again? If they do, do they ever do it at full price, or only ever at 40 per cent off? And if they do buy, what perception of your brand do they have? Do they see it as a high-quality aspirational brand, or just something to buy from the discount bin?

I’d love to know if brands have followed the customers that bought from them during past BFCM periods and tracked their later behaviour or their customer lifetime value. If you’ve done that and the numbers look good, then power on. If not, then is this the year to consider a different strategy? Instead of price-based discounts, could you participate in different ways? A value add-on, or unique product range? Even experiences?

I completely appreciate the drivers behind participating and am not advocating stopping completely. The question is how to do it without giving away your precious margin. I, and my promotional inbox, are hoping to see different strategies this year.

Who will unlock the value proposition of facial recognition in store

Finally, a store-based question, although still with a tech aspect. I’m particularly interested in the potential of personalisation in-store, and the role of facial recognition. This tech sits in such an interesting space. Every so often a news story will ‘break’ that a retailer is using facial recognition in-store and consumers will get upset about it. Yet they’ll spend the rest of the day using their face to unlock their phones, sign in to websites, and buy things. This tells us the issue is not with the tech itself, but the current value proposition.

A few years back, I published a research paper with colleagues around this exact issue and have written about it for Inside Retail. Consumers are pretty comfortable sharing their data, getting personally identified, and even using facial recognition, when they understand the benefits to them. Telling them you can ‘serve them better’ or even pointing to security concerns isn’t enough. It has to be about the customer, in terms they understand. When we pay with Apple Pay and scan our faces, the benefit to us is we don’t have to remember a wallet or carry cash, and clearly that’s enough for many consumers.

What is the equivalent for facial recognition in stores? For a minute there, it seemed like Amazon’s Scan and Go stores might have been the answer, but maybe not. Still, I think there’s a huge opportunity for retailers, given the other benefits this tech brings to operations and security. So that’s my big question: which brand will nail the value proposition of in-store facial recognition for consumers, and what mutual benefits will we see it bring?

Final word

As I mentioned at the start, these are just three questions I think will be really interesting to tackle in 2026. There are plenty of others; there may even be great answers to the ones above already. I’d love to hear about all of them, questions or answers, and am hoping to do more follow-ups on these topics throughout the year. Until then, here’s hoping for a successful, innovative and profitable year ahead for Aussie retail.

Dr Jason Pallant is director of RMIT’s Marketing Technology Lab, and a frequently published author of peer-reviewed academic studies on retail, technology and customer experience.