Market Snapshot
Q1, 2025
The retail industry is experiencing a fundamental transformation as traditional constraints evolve into potential market advantages for emerging leaders.Today's retailers face multiple challenges: a shifting labor market where worker expectations go beyond compensation, tightening capital access that demands more strategic growth approaches, and intensifying market polarization as value players move upmarket while luxury brands expand accessibility. This changing landscape, coupled with fragmenting supply chains and surging operating costs, requires retailers to fundamentally reimagine their traditional business models to stay competitive.
This report explores how breakthrough retailers are transforming these challenges into opportunities through five key capabilities: agile supply networks, scalable personal service, community-powered growth, efficient operating models, and market-led merchandising. By mastering these areas, retailers are setting a new standard for excellence. They are blending the personal touch of local retail with the operational efficiency of larger players, enabling them to achieve sustainable growth and redefine success in an evolving market environment.
Incisiv
As consumers continue to reshape their expectations,
enterprises must contend with a uniquely challenging landscape.
The consumer technology landscape is forever changing.
From Pinterest to TikTok, WeChat to Instagram, new experiences can rapidly gain consumer adoption and relevance.
From augmented reality to voice, smartwatches to chatbots, consumers are constantly embracing new interaction paradigms.
Commoditized convenience is eroding loyalty and margin.
Consumers expect convenience. If you can't deliver it, they'll go elsewhere - e.g. next day shipping becoming the new standard.
Walmart will reportedly lose USD 1 billion on eCommerce revenue of USD 21 billion this year as it faces challenges in its bid to complete against Amazon – from trouble integrating its DNVB acquisitions to impact on margin from its next-day delivery operations.
Consumers value experiences that are curated to fit their lives better.
They want to engage, be served, and transact at their time, their pace, their place. They have little patience, infinite choice and the freedom to swipe left at the slightest hint of friction.