Retail consumers still want value, but also proof, deals, & vibes
In February 2026, the DEPT® research team looked across the retail landscape to understand the signals shaping the year ahead.
What we found was an industry in transition. The old link between physical availability and purchase intent has weakened and, in some cases, disappeared altogether.
Retail leaders are no longer just competing for shelf space or share of wallet.
They are competing for ecosystem authority: the ability to shape discovery, trust, relevance, and conversion across a fragmented commerce landscape. As retail moves into the age of agentic commerce and sensory-first discovery, brands need to think beyond simply moving units.
The bigger opportunity is to connect better data, stronger cultural relevance, and more seamless customer experiences.
The hidden economy is becoming retail’s growth engine
For years, retail was largely a margin game. Now, it is becoming a data and media business too.
With Europe’s retail media market projected to hit €31B by 2028 and the U.S. retail media spend forecast to grow by 88.5% between 2024 and 2028, the sector is going through a major reset. The real asset is first-party transactional data: the clearest signal of what consumers value and how they behave.
That creates a new kind of operational pressure for brands. The scale and speed needed to run retail media networks now far exceed what teams can manage manually. Asset variation, channel compliance, audience targeting, and performance optimization have become too complex to handle through traditional workflows.
That is why more organizations are moving toward agentic operations. The goal is not just to keep up with the hidden economy, but to remove friction from it: speeding up decisions, tightening brand governance, and making execution easier to scale.
DEPT®’s work with Sainsbury’s Nectar360 is one example of that shift. Using a multi-agent AI approach, our team cut approval times from weeks to 90 seconds. As retail media grows, that kind of operational efficiency is quickly becoming a competitive advantage.
Physical retail is evolving into a trust and discovery channel
Even as ecommerce continues to grow, physical retail is taking on new importance.
For younger audiences, especially, stores are not just places to buy things. They are places to explore, experience, and validate. Shopping has become more emotional, more curated, and more sensory.
According to PwC, 41% of Gen Z shoppers say they visit stores primarily to see and touch the product (up from 34% in 2024), while 23% say they are making an event out of the trip. At the same time, physical retail remains commercially significant: 50% of Gen Z spending still comes from in-store mass merchandise and grocery purchases.
That matters because discovery today is shaped by aesthetics, algorithms, and imitation. In a market full of dupes, clones, and AI-generated sameness, realness has become a competitive advantage. The store now plays a more important role as the place where brands can prove what is real.
To support that shift, retailers need a stronger link between physical discovery and digital certainty. In practice, that could mean richer in-store product information, connected journeys from shelf to cart, or omnichannel experiences that make availability, fit, and fulfillment easier to understand. Digitizing the store is part of it. But the bigger job is making the whole buying journey feel more seamless, transparent, and trustworthy.
Price-neutral sustainability is the next loyalty play
One of the biggest tensions in retail right now is the gap between what consumers care about and what they can actually afford.
78% of consumers say sustainability matters to them, yet only 20% believe brands accurately represent their sustainability efforts. At the same time, the upside is clear for brands that can prove their case. Products with substantiated sustainability claims have been shown to grow 34% faster than those without, suggesting that shoppers do respond when claims feel specific, credible, and easy to understand.
“40% of Gen Z say they often buy items they will only wear or use once, which says a lot about how quickly affordability can override intention.
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The tension is especially visible among younger consumers. Gen Z consistently shows stronger intent to buy sustainable products, but intention alone does not guarantee conversion. Younger shoppers often still compromise on cost and convenience: 40% of Gen Z say they often buy items they will only wear or use once, which says a lot about how quickly affordability can override intention.
The challenge is to make sustainability feel easier, not harder. That means moving beyond premium positioning and toward price-neutral sustainability: reducing waste, improving supply chains, and using technology and AI to create efficiencies that can be passed on to the consumer.
Lidl Germany showed what that can look like in practice. Bringing plant-based prices in line with animal-protein alternatives drove a reported 30% uplift in plant-based sales. When the price barrier disappears, behavior changes faster.
That is the real unlock. When sustainability is built into operations, pricing, and product design, rather than added on as a message, adoption follows.
Cultural signals are replacing traditional media hierarchies
Mass awareness is no longer built through a single hero asset. It is built through a collection of signals.
In a multi-screen world, influence moves faster, fragments faster, and spreads differently. Social-first campaigns, creator ecosystems, and community-led behaviors increasingly shape what people notice, talk about, and buy. You can see that clearly around live sports, where more than 90% of Gen Z fans use social media to consume sports content, from clips and highlights to live moments and athlete content.
That demands a different creative model. Instead of asking a single polished campaign to do everything, brands need systems that can spot high-affinity moments, move quickly, and build on signals already gaining traction in culture.
DoorDash’s partnership with 50 Cent on The Big Beef is a good example. Built around the idea that game-day rivalries now play out as much in feeds and comment sections as they do on the field, the campaign skipped the traditional in-game approach and leaned into short-form, shareable content made for the places where audiences were already watching, reacting, and posting in real time.
That is the shift. The distance between scroll and shelf is getting shorter, and brands that can turn cultural participation into commercial intent will have the advantage.
Retail is no longer a vertical
It is an interconnected system of data, trust, media, experience, and operations.
That means brands need to move beyond old distinctions between digital and physical, brand and commerce, media and merchandising. The ones that win will design ecosystems that can respond to changing consumer behavior with more speed, intelligence, and resilience.
That means building agentic efficiency to handle complexity at scale. It means investing in the kinds of connected experiences that strengthen trust and protect brand equity. And it means rethinking value so better choices become more commercially viable for more people.
At DEPT®, we are seeing these shifts play out in real time. From automating ad approvals to helping global retailers build more connected commerce ecosystems, the focus stays the same: turning retail friction into competitive advantage.
Because the future of retail will be defined by who builds the most relevant, trusted, and intelligent ecosystem around the sale.
