10 Trends for Brand Marketers to Watch in 2022

Intro to Pear Commerce

Pear Commerce exists to bridge the data divide between retailers and brands selling in retail. We use our relationships to give brands critical sales and conversion data so they can run performance marketing - custom audiences, retargeting, and sales-optimized campaigns.

If you want to learn more about our shoppable media solutions, you can check us out here.

Summary

2022 is in full swing and we've seen a lot from customers across categories. Economic factors will create more uncertainty and opportunity. Brands need to monitor inflation, pricing, the stock market, labor, and wages to create appropriate offers for shoppers. Below are the top trends we are thinking about with our customers.

2022 Top 10 Trends for Brand Marketers to Watch in 2022

Mobile

2022 is the year of mobile! J/K - digital people get it. Carrying on...

Rising Prices

Labor, cost of goods and services, and just about everything is increasing in cost - according to your opinionated dinner party guests, your armchair economist friend, social media, and news outlets. This will impact shopping behaviors and brands should be prepared to respond accordingly.

Diversification

Price points, product types, packaging, categories, and more. With all the changes in 2022, experimentation will help brands win shoppers' hearts, minds, and wallets. Test and learn with new variations of products or explore higher margin or hyper growth categories. 

Personalization

Digital allows the most niche audience and shopper segmentation. Shoppers expect relevant communication. If you expect shoppers to engage and get on board with your products, its critical to find your audience. Use digital signals to improve all communications in store, offline, and online. Send hyper-personalized and targeted messages to drive awareness and sell products to maximize ROAS.

New Entrants 

Private label and DTC brands are everywhere. It costs almost nothing to spin up a website to start selling or to slap a label on a third-party manufacturer's product to compete with the big brands. Arm yourself with more data and insights with your partners. Demand help and transparency. They see your 100+ employee brand team and raise you a Shopify store and clever growth hacking for about the cost of cable.

E-Commerce

Double and triple down in digital sales. This is not just DTC. Its not just Amazon. Take control of all online sales. Brands that sell in multiple channels will flourish as they can control margins and profits better from HQ. Pros and cons exist on both sides. DTC gives you direct access to consumers (and their data, see next trend below), but shipping and fulfillment can wreck profitability for a brand. Retail is great for volume and distribution, but margins get thin with all the extra help. Pull levers available to you so your brand P&L gets optimized instead of obliterated. If you don’t have levers - we’d love to talk. Real time retail inventory and transactions augment existing brand insights. 

Automation 

Automate everything. Production, supply chain, ordering, processing, packaging, hard-to-fill labor, and more. We’re fans of automating optimizations on digital campaigns with retail sales from Pear Commerce, but automation in other areas work too.

Inventory Management

Knowing where your inventory levels are is critical. If you’re the fastest growing brand or balancing demand in soft or firm inventory spots, you’ll need to understand whats going on in all your retailers. Don’t rely on retailer, distributor, and velocity reporting exclusively. Companies with better data exist to help you achieve targets.

Alternative Products

Money is everywhere and looking for a home. Those placing bets continue piling into Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) focused opportunities. Alternatives to meat, dairy products, textiles, and more continue gaining traction. Shoppers prefer alternatives to the traditional diet and brands can offer other solutions to a shift in customer preferences.

Data

In the online world, Apple and iOS came out swinging by allowing users to opt out of tracking. Social campaigns were crippled and brands watched ROAS drop. This year, brands need to harmonize offline and online data to effectively communicate with shoppers. Zero-party data is here.

In the offline world, shopping still exists and there are plenty of insights to mine from this behavior. Understanding inventory, geographic ebbs and flows, retail preferences, and more can help paint a comprehensive picture of all shoppers and cohorts for brands.

Social Commerce & Walled Gardens

They are notorious for not being trackable or transparent. Nobody wants to play nice and nobody shares their toys. Brands get left in the corner with nothing to do but hope for the best. This will continue, but solutions exist to offer transparency while you capture critical eyeballs and sales from the latest TikTok dance or IG story. Brands need to invest here and should continue to do so. Influencers are influencing more than ever. Find partners that can help quantify your investment and compare ROAS to other advertising and marketing channels. I have a great reference.

Conclusion

Still with me? Brands have enough to worry about. We know there are a lot of options out there in shoppable media and e-commerce solutions. We saw an opportunity to improve. Many require manually entering UPCs or zip codes, updating inventory, or managing the store lists based on what you think is accurate inventory. That creates days of work to setup shoppable experiences and a lot of headaches with spreadsheets and weeks before you're live. Others charge extra for more retailers, UPCs, or landing pages. None of this is helping you manage or improve any of the above conditions that actually impact your business.

Pear Commerce is different and it was built for you! 

The "Holy Grail" of Advertising

Retail sales and closed loop attribution is often referred to as the “holy grail” for brand marketers. It is here. We built it. Then we automated the process so you can start measuring real ROAS in days not weeks.

We would love to introduce you to Pear Commerce. Click here to learn more.