In a world shaped by digital transformation, changing consumer values and fierce competition, brand influence is a retailer’s most powerful tool. However, this challenging retail landscape makes building and retaining brand influence difficult. To offer support to retailers, commercetools commissioned Foundry, a research firm, to conduct a study to explore what drives influence today, and identify strategies and tactics brands are using to shape consumer perception and behaviors.
We distilled the data and insights into a series of eBooks, each one focused a single strategy. Here we offer a sneak peek of what we learned about how to build brand influence.
Brand influence takes center stage
Brand influence has always mattered, but its importance has evolved in tandem with economic, social and technological shifts. What began as a tool for trust and identification is now a complex, multi-dimensional strategy for shaping perceptions, fostering loyalty and driving long-term success. While the principles remain rooted in trust and consistency, the stakes and methods have grown exponentially in the digital era.
In the days of brick-and-mortar, retailers had a lot more power over shaping their own brand narrative, but the rise of digital commerce has changed all that. With consumers having access to more options and more information and brands having to deal with competition on a global scale, delivering exceptional customer experience (CX) has become critical to ensuring that your brand is always a top choice in consumers’ minds.
eBook #1 |Unifying retail experiences with composable commerce focuses on the role technology plays in strengthening brand influence. It explains how the composable commerce approach has emerged as the key enabler allowing brands to deliver unified commerce. It also highlights the CX improvements shoppers recognize after brands embrace composable commerce to unify their retail experiences.
The study identified the six biggest challenges business leaders face in delivering CX that drives brand influence — and found that all of them are caused by a lack of technical agility.
eBook #2 |Empower agility with a modern tech stack expands on the themes introduced in eBook #1. It reinforces the connection between composability and agility, introducing what a modern, composable commerce tech stack looks like and how its MACH®-driven capabilities dramatically improve a brand’s ability to easily and quickly adapt to change. It features case studies from PetSmart and Ulta Beauty, both of which present specific CX improvements the brands have been able to deliver through digital transformation.
eBook #3 | Prioritizing customer experience in a digitally driven world takes a deep dive into the top 10 factors that impact your customers' overall experience with your brand. These factors, in turn, influence how they perceive your brand, their emotional connection to it and ultimately your ability to build brand influence. It reveals the CX commonalities that influential brands share, analyzes differences based on five verticals including Luxury, Technology and Apparel, and explains how you can leverage customer feedback to improve CX.
While eBooks 1, 2, and 3 present invaluable insights and strategies for building brand influence in 2025, eBook #4 | Embracing innovation to spearhead what’s next for CX, is focused on future-proofing your success. It reinforces the need for brands to continually explore and embrace new trends and technologies to ensure they can continuously deliver experiences that meet customer expectations and retain brand influence. It also spotlights the top emerging trends, providing tangible examples to illustrate how brands can put them into action.
The infographic below provides compelling findings from our study that amplify the urgency for commerce leaders to prioritize CX initiatives in 2025.
The biggest takeaway from the study is that offering great products that people want and need, and making them available across physical and digital channels is not enough to build an influential brand. Brands such as Amazon, Nike, L’Oréal, Apple and Rolex reinforce this truth — these companies have been able to foster emotional connections, establish trust and motivate customers to continually purchase with them by implementing business and technology-led strategies that enable them to consistently provide exceptional experiences.
To learn more about how your brand (regardless of size) can achieve the goals of unifying retail experiences, enabling agility, prioritizing CX and embracing innovation, explore our eBook series, How to Build Brand Influence in 2025: Exploring Effective Strategies.
Anita J. Temple is the Corporate Journalist at commercetools. She was a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and W Magazine before launching a career as a freelance writer and creative producer. She has written content and worked on a wide range of marketing projects for companies including Dreamworks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Adidas.