In 2026, brands are more approachable, eccentric, and unpretentious than ever. 

“2026 is the year of the normal person,” says Grace Clarke, head of community at Shopify. “Brands are finding more ways to engage with real people in a genuine way. It’s about finding ways to encourage your community to talk about the products, sort of optimizing for the group chat and not the public Instagram story.” 

To cultivate valuable word-of-mouth marketing, brands are finding ways to resonate with their audiences long after an interaction, such as hosting events where audiences can learn a new skill or slowing down content to engage viewers deeply. They’re also getting more deliberate about personalization.

“More and more marketing is rooted in people’s identities,” Grace adds. “Real people cannot be replaced by funneling more money into marketing. Instead, brands are thinking about how to use their resources to make it easier for real people to advocate for what they actually care about.”

Experts, founders, and brand leaders have already charted a course for 2026, and they predict that seven major trends will define the year—from individualized rewards to paradigm-shifting AI.

Customer rewards will be hyper-personal

Hair and body care brand Ouai plans to use new, highly customized ways to reward its customers in 2026. 

“ The gamification of loyalty is something that we’re excited about,” says Ouai CEO Hannah Beals. 

True loyalty—or unwavering support for a brand—dropped from 34% in 2024 to 29% in 2025, according to enterprise resource planning software provider SAP. That means brands must work harder than ever to offer unique experiences that keep customers coming back.

Ouai is leaning into personalization to make its rewards program more rewarding. The plan is to go beyond the traditional “points for purchases” model, finding ways to reward customers for social media comments, reviews, repeat purchases, and even wearing the brand’s merch on Instagram. 

“We do a lot of high-touch, individualized stuff,” Hannah says, teasing an upcoming launch that will reward customers who are fans of a particular product. 

“We’ve handpicked everyone on our website who has bought something in that fragrance already, and we’re going to do something personalized and high-touch for all the customers we know love the scent.” 

Brands looking to create more personalized rewards can start by using first-party data, like customer data collected through Shopify Analytics, to learn about customer behavior and create reward tiers. 

Brands will create meaningful, formative experiences

For kitchenware brand Hedley & Bennett, throwing more in-person events in 2026 is a chance to counter consumers’ digital fatigue. Although the amount of time people report spending online has increased, founder Ellen Bennett sensed a change in 2025: a shift in focus from online to offline and an increase in the number of events. 

“I think people are craving in-person experiences in a real way,” she says. “Doing things where we’re helping people become better in their craft, whether it’s classes or connecting with pros, is bridging the gap between our home cooks and our pro cooks and serving them both by inspiring them to learn from each other’s worlds.”

Ellen also feels inspired by how even non-food brands—particularly beauty brands—are using food as a way to relate to their audiences. Whether they are planning intimate dinners or pop-ups, these events are social, tactile, and grounding. 

“It’s just going back to things that are real,” she says. “There’s a connection back to our roots of food, eating, taking care of each other, and just not being on our phones all day long.” 

In-person connection is more powerful than ever at a time when more consumers are turning to large language models like ChatGPT for intellectual self-improvement. 

“AI cannot yet replace in-person experience,” says Shopify’s Grace. “In-person is the final frontier of togetherness. It’s the electricity that exists between people. As we start to use AI as a thought partner and a way to up-level ourselves, in-person experience becomes not just more soul-filling, but genuinely fun and surprising. It’s the place we go for novelty and to feel understood.”

The good news for brands wanting to follow in Hedley & Bennett’s footsteps is that events don’t have to be big productions. At Event Marketer’s TrendWatch event in late 2025, experts stated that younger generations are more interested in low-key, micro events where they can meaningfully connect with others.

Video content will encourage viewers to slow down

In October 2025, skin care brand Sonsie, posted a video on TikTok where its cofounder Pamela Anderson shares her rules for tending her garden. While only a minute and 39 seconds long, the video’s leisurely pace, cinematic style, and longer-than-average length (for TikTok, at least) encourage viewers to stop scrolling and take part in Pamela’s routine. In 2026, Sonsie wants to create more of these videos.

“I am loving this trend of what’s being referred to as ‘slow content,’” says Kailey Bradt, CEO of Sonsie. “This short film format gives you a great opportunity to do the storytelling of the brand, which I think is so much fun. It’s much more creative. We have so much fun ideating these things. It’s this idea that you can create a mini movie to storytell, and you’re not stuck to the seven seconds of scrolling.” 

The so-called seven-second rule on TikTok is the idea that users typically watch less than seven seconds’ worth of a video before scrolling. But instead of optimizing for shrinking attention spans, Sonsie creates content that rewards users who slow down—with real results. 

Kailey notes that audiences are starting to engage with longer, more aesthetically rewarding content on TikTok, and she’s seen this firsthand. 

“People are watching these videos, and they’re sharing them not even knowing what the brand is,” she says. “It’s a nice way to get out of your own head. If you’re scrolling and you see something really beautiful, then you find yourself watching it for a minute and a half, it’s kind of like, ‘OK, I took my pause. I don’t need to keep scrolling.’ I think it’s having a really positive impact.” 

“I’ve been fascinated by slow content since I first came across Norwegian train videos,” Grace says. “People’s nervous systems are haywire, especially if you are a consumer. Slowing down is very calming and actually gives consumers a chance to latch onto something. Compare that with a 60-second TikTok video that has 27 jump cuts and no clip longer than a second and a half. That’s attention-getting, but it’s not resonance-building.”

Grace notes that resonance is what drives purchases. 

“Psychologically, the longer we have with one thought, the more likely we are to take an action because of it—because we’re motivated, not stressed out,” she says.

Influencers will have more creative freedom

Sponsored influencer content outperforms brands’ own organic content, with 83% of marketers saying influencer content converts better, according to Sprout Social. For Kimberly Kreuzberger, founder and CEO of Pivot Projects agency, 2026 is a year for brands to put more of their trust in creators and let them take the lead. 

“You’re seeing this with a lot of the big YouTubers, where they really control the content and the output,” she says. “It’s less about inserting talent into a campaign and more about finding a blend of the creative direction of that talent, what they think will work, and what humor should be infused for it to be really successful.” 

Taking this approach can also help brands land deals with top influencers. According to the Sprout Social survey, 21% of influencers say the amount of creative control they’ll have influences whether they work with a brand. Creators understand their audiences. By giving them creative freedom, they can find the most authentic way to connect with them, which can positively impact a buyer’s impression of your brand. 

The brand-consumer power dynamic will flip

For Michael Petry, cofounder and creative director of shoe brand Golden West Boots, customer feedback is more important than ever. 

“In the past, bigger brands would dictate what the trends were, and they were able to sort of push that narrative on people,” he says. “That has sort of gone away. It’s harder to direct consumers into your direction, whereas you take a lot more feedback directly from the consumer.”

This type of mutual exchange allows brands to market with a wink. 

“Right now, consumers, more than ever, are participating in marketing,” Grace says. “You see this in people commenting on advertisements, ‘Amazing marketing’ or ‘Give your marketer a raise.’ Consumers now know what marketing is, and they don’t mind. We’re all sort of breaking the fourth wall, saying, ‘We made this thing; I hope you like it.’”

Michael suggests looking at your direct messages on social media, as well as using email surveys, which are the most effective way to gather feedback, according to Brightlocal data. Additionally, the study notes that when brands respond to messages—whether positive or negative—89% of customers are more likely to want to make a purchase because they feel considered and heard. 

“Feedback is where the consumer has more power and sway over you than they used to, and I think that’s great,” Michael adds. “I’m trying to find the intersection between commerce and art, and I think that point is where the consumer wins. The more feedback you get directly from the consumer, the better your brand is.”

AI will further shape ecommerce

Consumers are using artificial intelligence across the entire purchase cycle. In a McKinsey study, 73% of respondents said they used AI to learn more about brands and products, 61% used it to compare products and services, and 57% used it to get personal recommendations. 

Paul Tran, founder of grooming tool brand Manscaped, says AI will fundamentally change ecommerce. 

“I believe there’s going to be a paradigm shift over the next couple of years,” he says. “Consumers’ exploration of new products will be really disrupted by AI.”

He believes companies will move away from search engine optimization to LLM optimization. “This time around, it’s not just about squeezing keywords on our webpages,” he says, explaining that LLMs will aggregate reviews from multiple data sources, not just your website alone. 

“It’s about being authentic and having quality products because these large language models amass so much data that you can’t really spoof it,” he says. “So either you’re paying for it as a sponsored listing or you have to develop really good products so you can rank organically.” 

Brands will have a higher bar for authentic content

For Jaz Fenton and Jamil Bhuya, cofounders of design studio Otherhalf, the rise of AI opens the door for more authentic content.

“That’s going to be a huge thing for us to focus on in 2026: continuing to level up the game of creating authentic content, especially with a lot of the brands we work with,” Jaz says. “They’re eight-, nine-figure brands that don’t want to be seen as everyone else.”

Jamil adds that AI is a valuable tool for a variety of applications, but in the realm of content creation, it can create homogeneity. 

“AI becomes a tool that creates a higher baseline,” he says. “It’s kind of what happened with smartphones. Everyone got access to cameras suddenly, and the bar for content increased. With AI, you’re going to get a lot of standard content that just feels inauthentic. The people who are doing authentic, creative work are going to be valued more.” 

Brands that return to the evergreen “surprise and delight” strategy can work with both Al tools and innovative content creators to stand out in an ever-more-saturated media landscape. They can also draw from an increasingly diverse pool of talent from all around the world.

“One of the best things that happened with remote work is that it brought teams, marketing teams specifically, into distributed areas,” Grace says. “By virtue of just living their lives in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Nashville, Houston, or middle-of-nowhere Iowa, they bring other influences to the table. Marketing and brand building is a group project, and I think all these community inputs have made brands much more resilient.”

In 2026, embrace what makes your brand different

As these founders and experts demonstrate, there isn’t one singular approach that will help brands make more human connections with their customers. Instead, as Grace suggests, businesses should worry less about perfection and more about creating moments that are unique to them—and even a little unusual.

“Anything that a brand does should be a little off,” Grace says. “It should be slightly different. It’s actually safer for a brand to do something distinct and kind of weird because that is going to be more memorable and get people’s attention.”