Powering the Future of Personalized Commerce: Generative AI in Retail Marketing

When I first spotted that now-iconic Dubai chocolate bar on my TikTok feed – that thick, brick-like bar with the pistachio-green filling that both looks gooey and tasty in every video – I knew my upcoming Dubai trip wouldn't be complete without hunting it down. This shopping purchase perfectly captures retail's profound transformation: from mass marketing to authentic, engaging brand moments on social platforms.  

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The path from discovering a chocolate bar on TikTok to making a purchase in Dubai represents a complete reinvention of the retail marketing playbook. As social commerce reshapes discovery and generative AI transforms content creation, retailers face both an opportunity and a challenge: how to scale authentic experiences while maintaining personalization. Let's look at the key trends driving this shift, and how emerging technologies are helping brands meet rising consumer expectations. 

6 trends reshaping how we sell  

How Generative AI is powering the next wave of retail content 

4 ways retailers are leveraging AI in retail marketing today 

Real-life examples of GenAI's impact on retail marketing 

6 trends reshaping how we sell  

1. Social commerce: The data is clear: social commerce has emerged as the dominant force in retail with The Influencer Marketing Hub revealing that 98% of consumers were to make social purchases in 2024 – a dramatic increase from 68% in 2023. Shopping is no longer just transactional; it's more social, emotional, and community-driven.  

2. Personalized interactions: The era of "one audience, one message" is gone. According to Salesforce's latest State of Marketing report, 73% of customers now expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, yet only 32% of marketers are completely satisfied with how they use customer data to create relevant experiences. Smart marketers are looking at new technologies and tools to create and test advertising, emails, and landing pages tailored to multiple audience segments.   

3. First-party data strategy: The deprecation of third-party cookies has catalyzed a first-party data revolution. Leading retailers are responding by building robust owned channels and loyalty programs. We’re also expecting to see a surge in retail media networks advertising, in which brands can advertise on retailers’ channels.  

5. Short-form video: Short-form video has become the primary vehicle for product discovery, with 37% of consumers actively seeking product information through this format. This trend is reshaping product marketing, requiring brands to adapt their storytelling approach for platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels.  

6. Influencer marketing: In 2025, over 50% of brands plan to increase budget spend on creators with a particular focus on micro and nano-influencers. This investment reflects a broader shift: authentic, creator-driven content is now outperforming traditional branded content across all metrics.  

7. AI integration milestone: Lastly, AI adoption in retail has reached a tipping point. Salesforce reports that 58% of retailers are already leveraging generative AI for content creation. Retailers are rapidly adopting GenAI to help scale their content while saving on time and costs. 

How Generative AI is powering the next wave of retail content 

As retail marketing adapts to a dynamic landscape marked by social commerce, influencer-driven campaigns, and the rising demand for hyper-personalization, generative AI has become a critical enabler of these trends. Here’s how AI in retail marketing is empowering retailers to stay ahead: 

1. Scaling content for every channel: Retailers are leveraging generative AI to produce consistent, on-brand content across digital platforms at unprecedented speed and scale. This capability ensures that brands can meet the growing demand for tailored messaging in social commerce and digital advertising while maintaining their unique identity. 

2. Hyper-personalized interactions: AI has moved beyond basic audience segmentation to create genuinely personalized shopping experiences across all customer touch points. By integrating personalized GenAI platforms like Typeface, retailers can use its brand agent, Brand Kits, and Audiences to generate content precisely aligned with their brand voice and tailored to audience segments. 

3. Market localization: Expanding into new markets no longer requires extensive resources for manual adaptation. Generative AI enables retailers to localize campaigns with cultural nuance, ensuring relevance while preserving brand consistency. This not only accelerates market entry but also enhances engagement with regional audiences. 

4. Visual content production: Retailers can now create studio-quality product shots, lifestyle visuals, and on-location imagery at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional methods. This efficiency empowers brands to test and optimize visuals across platforms, enhancing the impact of short-form video and other visually driven trends. 

5. Smarter SEO strategies: Generative AI is elevating SEO by creating content that not only ranks well but also resonates with audiences. By focusing on search intent and user engagement, AI helps retailers craft content that aligns with evolving search algorithms while driving meaningful connections with customers. 

6. Creative automation for multi-platform agility: Adapting content for diverse formats and platforms is now a seamless process. AI tools can reformat text, resize visuals, and optimize messaging for social media, email, or digital ads—all while maintaining a cohesive brand message. This streamlines workflows, freeing up valuable time for strategy and innovation. 

4 ways retailers are leveraging AI in retail marketing today 

While generative AI has many applications in retail, from customer service chatbots to inventory forecasting, we're seeing the biggest immediate impact in content creation and merchandising. Here's how retailers are using GenAI to solve real challenges.

1. Visual merchandizing and product photography

Traditional product photography is a major bottleneck for most retailers. A single product shoot can tie up your studio for days and cost thousands – and that's before you factor in lifestyle shots or seasonal updates. Leading retailers are now using AI product photography to:

• Create product images in lifestyle settings across their catalog

• Generate seasonal lifestyle shots without location shoots

• Update product displays across websites, ads, and marketplaces in hours instead of weeks

• Test different product presentations without additional photography costs

Retailers can now generate multiple product shots with different backgrounds and settings in hours rather than weeks. With Typeface, retailers simply upload their product images or integrate their existing catalog via an API to select the desired product(s), and any decorative elements, then describe their desired setting. The AI system handles the complex work of blending the product with the scene, adjusting lighting, shadows, and perspective to create natural-looking product shots that maintain brand consistency.

Typeface’s technology offers several key features that are particularly valuable for retail applications. Product preservation technology ensures that all essential product details remain intact throughout the creative process. This means your products' exact colors, proportions, logos, fonts, and more stay consistent across all variations. This level of precision is crucial for maintaining brand integrity and meeting marketplace requirements.

Image harmonization technology takes this a step further by automatically adjusting lighting, shadows, and reflections to better blend products with backgrounds. This creates more realistic and engaging product presentations as items appear naturally integrated into their settings rather than simply pasted into a background. 

Lastly, Typeface’s Visual Inspiration Studio helps streamline the creative process by providing access to pre-set layouts organized by industry and use case or uploading your own 3D product renders or packshots. Retail marketing teams can customize these templates with their own products and brand style guide, significantly reducing the time spent on creative conceptualization while ensuring professional results.

2. SEO-optimized articles to drive web traffic to product listings

For retailers, SEO isn't just about general website traffic – it's about driving qualified shoppers to your product listings and category pages. Traditional content creation for SEO is time-intensive, requiring constant monitoring of trends and manual optimization of product descriptions, category pages, and editorial content.

For example, when a monochrome fashion emerged as a major trend, one of our customers, a major British multinational retailer, needed to quickly create content that would capture this search traffic. Using Typeface’s content repurposing templates, they could generate SEO-optimized article about the trend, naturally incorporating links to relevant product listings – turning search interest into shopping activity.

Retailers can accelerate this process using AI-powered templates that combine SEO best practices with their specific keyword targets and audience segments. The system generates a keyword-rich first draft in seconds, allowing teams to focus on refinement rather than starting from scratch.

The platform also ensures brand style by applying your Brand Kit, including tone, brand values, and channel-specific Voices automatically while analyzing content performance. Built-in SEO scoring and optimization suggestions with Content Explainability helps teams maintain search visibility while keeping content aligned with both brand standards and customer preferences. 

3. Social and paid media ad campaigns

Traditional ad creation processes can't keep up with the pace and personalization demands of social commerce, yet the stakes are higher than ever. The retail industry leads media advertising spend, accounting for 49.7% of total U.S. media spending in 2022, with investments reaching $46.4 billion in 2023.

Leading retailers are transforming their approach to ad creation using AI, enabling them to quickly generate and test multiple ad variations while maintaining brand consistency. Using Typeface's platform and AI ad generators, retail teams can create platform-specific ads tailored to each social channel's unique requirements, from Meta sponsored posts to Instagram's carousel ads. The system provides many AI ad templates to get started, including ad copy, Meta Ad, Instagram Ad, and more. It also offers a "Generate Text" feature, where you can input custom AI copywriting prompts to generate ad copy.

The technology is particularly valuable for retailers managing multiple campaigns across different markets and audience segments. Marketing teams can input their core message and campaign goals to generate various headlines, descriptions, and calls-to-action optimized for different audiences. This extends to visual content as well, with AI adjusting imagery to resonate with specific market preferences. Retailers can now rapidly test different creative approaches, from awareness-focused social campaigns to conversion-driven paid media ads, identifying which combinations of messaging and visuals drive the strongest performance.

To streamline the campaign workflow further, the platform integrates directly with major advertising and social media management tools. For instance, retailers using our Google Ads integration can generate multiple Performance Max creative assets at scale – including images, descriptions, and headlines – and publish them to one or more campaigns with a few clicks. This integration helps retail teams move from content creation to campaign activation more efficiently, spending less time on production and more time optimizing performance.

Here's a great resource if you want to learn more about using an AI social media ad generator.

4. AI content personalization for retail businesses 

Modern retail advertising demands content that works across dozens of platforms, formats, and audience segments. While digital advertising platforms offer sophisticated targeting capabilities, many retailers struggle to create enough variations of their ads to fully leverage these targeting options.

Creative Automation is transforming how retailers approach this challenge. Once a primary ad creative is approved, the system can automatically adapt it for different formats and channels while preserving the original design integrity. This means a single approved ad can be automatically reformatted for  display banners in different aspect ratios or languages, eliminating the tedious process of manual resizing and redesign.

For retail marketing teams, this automation dramatically accelerates campaign deployment. What previously took months of back-and-forth between creative and marketing teams can now be accomplished in days. The system handles technical requirements like aspect ratio adjustments and platform-specific formatting automatically. Brand integrity remains protected through the use of pre-approved templates.

The technology is particularly valuable for personalization and localization at scale. Retailers can now create dozens of targeted variations from a single parent ad, automatically adjusting headlines, calls-to-action, and imagery to match different audience segments. For example, a holiday campaign can be quickly adapted with different messaging and visuals for various customer segments, age groups, or geographic regions – all while maintaining brand consistency. Learn more on how it works. 

Real-life examples of GenAI's impact on retail marketing 

Leading retailers are already seeing big improvements in their marketing operations through AI implementation. Here are three examples that demonstrate the practical impact:

• A major hair care brand transformed their eCommerce content production, reducing creation time for lifestyle product imagery for product catalog from three months to just hours. This efficiency gain is particularly valuable for maintaining fresh content across their website and marketplace listings.

• A global beverage company used AI for their point-of-sale advertising by creating location-specific content showing their products paired with local cuisine. This personalized approach helps them build stronger connections with local customers while maintaining global brand standards.

• A national grocery chain solved their multi-brand campaign challenge using creative automation. They now efficiently adapt campaigns across their store brands, automatically adjusting brand elements while maintaining consistency – turning what was once a complex coordination effort into a streamlined process.

The future of retail marketing

As social commerce continues to grow and consumer expectations for personalized experiences rise, AI-powered content creation is becoming a competitive necessity rather than a luxury. The question isn't whether to adopt AI for retail marketing, but how quickly you can integrate it into your operations to stay ahead of rapidly evolving consumer expectations.

Get a demo of Typeface or start free today to experience the transformative effects of AI on your retail strategy.