Personalization, Processes, and Other Takeaways From Shoptalk 2025

Studio Science CEO Steve Pruden and Enterprise Account Executive Mike Blaney contributed to this article. 

As the most visible and prevalent customer-facing industry in people’s lives, retail is often viewed as a guiding light in terms of customer behaviors and innovative marketing strategies. And the place where these top retail brands showcase and learn about the approaches that will impact customer engagement in 2025 is at Shoptalk in Las Vegas.

We were in attendance at the annual retailer conference talking to brands and getting a lay of the land for what they're looking to achieve and the challenges they’re encountering along the way.

These are the biggest focal points we heard.

Data and Personalization

This should be of no surprise. Especially for those responsible for commerce and digital experiences, so many of the priorities for the year revolve around doing a better job of leveraging data and their insights to create more tailored experiences across all touchpoints and channels. As you can imagine, AI was a major presence in this conversation. How to leverage AI tools to better reach key audiences and drive more granular personalization at scale came up over and over. 

Other technologies that made a splash came in the form of integrations and partnerships. A major announcement that came during the conference was the news that rapidly growing Walmart Marketplace has partnered with J.P. Morgan Payments to help accelerate the payments experience for sellers in the marketplace. The payments integration impacts every stage of the payment cycle and powers the seller wallet.

Seamless customer experiences require connected, seamless tech ecosystems. So these types of partnerships are not surprising, given the impact they make on brands, and more of these partnerships are likely to come.

Improving Internal Processes and Workflows

Improving customer experiences was naturally a major focal point, but so was identifying how brands’ teams themselves can work smarter and more efficiently. This is a trend we’ve been seeing for a while now as budgets tighten and customer expectations expand. Companies have to find ways to do more with less.

For the marketing and creative teams specifically, one of the biggest goals was finding ways to create more compelling and engaging content while getting it out to market faster. This includes looking at the latest marketing technology to help them do their jobs more effectively. Our partner Optimizely was demonstrating this on the expo floor by showing how to streamline the content supply chain with its OptimizelyOne platform.

More broad business issues were also top of mind. Marketers continue to struggle with prioritizing the seemingly endless stream of tasks and touchpoints they have to manage and how to sell these strategies to key stakeholders.

Everyone is Looking for Improvements

Outside of the one or two brands who seemed completely content with every aspect of their business, 95% of the attendees were seeking ways to improve their experiences or processes. And that’s a positive sign. At the rate this landscape is evolving, standing still means being out of date in six months. The only option is to grow and evolve.

But it also was a nice reminder that no one there was alone. Regardless of the size or specifications of the company in attendance, everyone was dealing with similar challenges and looking for answers to key questions. Certainly some were answered at the show, but three days in Vegas isn’t enough time to feel like the job is complete.

If you are reading this and feel yourself nodding along to the challenges and questions, that’s a good sign. That means you’re ready to embrace better. And if you can’t do it alone, check out our services and learn how we can help.