Where do we go from here? Feeling squeezed, brand marketers define a way forward 

The importance of keeping the customer at the center of strategies was emphasized by marketers throughout the Summit — in part, because it’s a stressful time for them, as well.

“This carpet-bombing of tariffs has created a confusing web, and everybody’s trying to understand the net impact,” Oura’s head of global retail, Jeremiah Linder, told Modern Retail. “It’s tricky — and just like all brands, we’re navigating through that now. Eventually the customer is probably going to suffer the most out of all of this, which sucks.” 

Building and expanding upon existing communities to increase customer loyalty is a brand priority, considering advertising costs are high and communities have a reputation for showing up for brands in tough times — many proved lifelines during the pandemic.

“Staying in touch with your customer — really in touch with your customer — is so important,” said a brand marketer in a small group discussion about modern brand building. “So many brands have lost touch with their customer — they think they know them just by being on socials and listening, but not really. Getting in a room with them as much as you can is so important, [as is] immersing in culture: getting out there and hitting the road and meeting your customer in different cities to immerse yourself in their world. That can include hosting focus groups or events, or simply experiencing their culture and coming back with whatever you find. [Marketers] get very close to their day-to-day and forget that there’s a larger world out there. [Stepping out] has opened our eyes to interesting things.”

She added, “You can’t have a brand architecture and framework without a strong strategy, and that usually starts with this kind of research and its [resulting] insights.”

For another brand, “leaning into niche interests” — like Formula 1, through a product collaboration — has resulted in “a lot of traction” among existing and potential customers. “Maybe it’s a smaller [target] audience, but they’re loving the experiences we’re providing because it’s [catered to them],” the brand’s head of marketing said. “We have one store, and we’re constantly doing events and workshops, and finding ways to ensure all our customers feel seen. Community is huge [for us] right now, more than ever.” 

Listening to the customer enables the “constant mini-evolutions” that are necessary for a brand to thrive, Summit attendees agreed. “You pull your current customers along without scarring them, while attracting new customers,” a brand marketer said, adding, “You can’t do what brands used to do, which was to rebrand every 20 years.” 

In addition, brands are becoming more discerning when choosing partnerships, both with other companies and with influencers, to ensure the payoff exceeds the investment. 

Francesca Mileo, senior director of marketing at the jewelry brand BaubleBar, said the brand gets around 30 inbound requests per day from companies wanting to collaborate. Speaking about the dozens of “Wicked” and “Barbie” product collabs that rolled in step with the movies’ releases, she said, “They are so expensive. We love doing those things, and it’s fun being part of the cultural conversation, and you get brand awareness — but are people shopping? Are the extremely high IP costs worth it? I don’t know how much you’re getting out of it, and that’s time that’s being taken away from your team who could be doing other things.”

Another marketer mentioned that her brand did “amazing sales” on a “Barbie” candle, but “the customer didn’t come back.” 

Instead, BaubleBar is focusing on its larger, more exclusive and longer-term partnerships with the NFL, the NBA and Disney, among other companies. They greatly benefit the brand by “opening up so many points of distribution,” Mileo said.

In a Summit town hall discussion focused on brand challenges, another marketer — who lamented that “things keep getting faster, and faster, and faster” — questioned the current importance of traditional influencers as brands increasingly bet on “influencers in real life.”

A fellow attendee confirmed that the power of influencers is decreasing, but, he said, they’re still worthwhile partners. “During the pandemic, we had an influencer do $1 million in sales in one day, off of a $40,000 spend — we saw mind-blowing ROI sometimes. Nowadays, we’re happy to get 1x ROI — but it’s still the best top-of-funnel marketing I can do with true attribution, when there’s a coupon code.”

For its part, one of Claire’s newest partners, on the retail front, is TikTok Shop — because it fits the company’s current focus on performance, said Meghan Hurley, Claire’s vp of global marketing and e-commerce, during an onstage interview. 

“I’ve been telling my teams, ‘Every single thing you can do to drive performance, [do it] — now is the time,’” Hurley said, noting that scaling SMS is also among the company’s newer tactics. “We recently hired a performance agency, and our focus has been driving performance and performance metrics so that we can do the fun stuff and also navigate [the unknown challenges] coming our way.”

Across the board, brands agreed that hard work is currently coming before any “fun stuff.” On a similar note, some said the results of true work are set to trump any stemming from shortcuts, including using AI. 

“I’m anti-AI; I’m a big AI hater,” said Katharine McKee, vp of e-commerce at One Jeanswear Group. “That’s mainly because it makes you lazy. But it’s also a learned model, so it’s based on the average of everything it saw on the internet, and the internet’s awash in nonsense. When you make the median version of that, it’s never going to be good. The brands that are going to win are the ones who are not going to [rely on AI] –  they’re going to stick to their guns and be true to themselves and true to their customers. And, yes, that does take way longer, it is way harder, and it is going against the grain. But it’s the only way to avoid the great ‘millennialing,’ when all websites were one flat pink color and you couldn’t tell them apart.”

She added, “You’ve got to be careful with the AI stuff outside, even outside of the ‘uncanny valley’ weird models — because you read AI copy and you know it’s AI because it’s all in that one voice, and it all has that same syntax and context to it. If you spend the extra hour and have a human do it, you’ll probably have more engaged customers.”

Another marketer added that “AI can be great for saving money when a human isn’t needed.” However, when it comes to leveraging AI to create marketing materials, brands wind up “missing the opportunity of human influencers or crew members amplifying the experience.” 

“If you’re using an AI robot, then you miss out on another side of metrics and engagement and a cool factor that you can get out into the world,” she said. 

But there were also the AI evangelists who said they’re actively leveraging the technology, but carefully. 

“AI has unlocked a new opportunity to be scrappy and make your dollar stretch, and that’s more important than ever with the economy that we’re in,” said a marketer in a small group. “If you’re a growing brand, you need it; you have to lean in. It’s about having the baseline of strong brand guidelines and then leveraging AI where it makes sense. You can stay authentic, you can stay true to your customer — but sometimes you have a photo of a gold earring that you want to show in silver instead. [Using AI] saves $20, and, in the long term, those savings go a long way.”

Another marketer played up the speed AI facilitates. “You have to move faster than ever, and retail has always been a fast-moving landscape,” they said. “AI helps you hit that speed button that you didn’t have before, and to be more agile and pivot. You hear about ad fatigue, and you hear about content fatigue — AI solves for that; in this climate, it’s a big unlock.”