Episode Summary
In this solo episode of the 7-Figures and Beyond ecommerce podcast, host Greg Shuey dives into the WARC x GWI 2025 Consumer Trends Report and breaks down five pivotal insights that D2C marketers and eCommerce brand owners need to understand to thrive in today’s shifting landscape. From the widening wealth gap that demands a complex brand strategy, to the growing power of creator trust, Greg lays out how AI assistants are disrupting traditional marketing funnels, why health-focused benefits must now be specific and proven, and how communities are becoming the new top-of-funnel engine. With real-world implications and tactical takeaways, Greg emphasizes that brands who act fast on these insights will be best positioned for success in Q4 and 2026.
Key Takeaways
- Don’t Market to the Middle: The wealth gap is splitting consumers into budget-conscious vs. premium spenders. Marketers must choose: offer price-driven value or deliver premium experiences with emotional resonance.
- Creators Are the New Trust Channel: Nearly 50% of consumers made a purchase based on a creator recommendation. Reach is less important than credibility; trust drives action. Invest in long-term, value-aligned creator partnerships, not one-off influencer posts.
- AI Is Rewriting the Funnel: AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are now making product recommendations and even purchases. Discovery is being delegated to machines, so visibility in AI results is now mission-critical. Brands must optimize for structured data, relevance, and presence in trusted third-party sources.
- Health Is the New Table Stakes: Gen Z and Millennials want functional health benefits (gut health, immunity, energy) not just vague wellness claims. Benefits must be clearly embedded in PDPs and packaging. Testimonials must be authentic and reflect sustained use (60–90+ days).
- Community Is a Top-of-Funnel Engine: Interest-based communities (both online and offline) are where buying decisions start. Slack groups, forums, local meetups, and social tribes influence purchase behavior. Brands should build relationships, sponsor experiences, and embed themselves authentically within these micro-communities.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- Which of my products or collections serve either the budget shopper or the premium buyer, and how am I messaging to each?
- Am I currently partnering with creators who truly align with my brand’s values and can build long-term trust?
- Is my brand and product data optimized to show up in AI assistants and LLM tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity?
- How am I differentiating my health/wellness-related claims with specific, measurable benefits?
- Where are my potential customers spending time online in communities, and how can I genuinely show up there?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
2025 Consumer Trends Report Download: https://www.warc.com/content/paywall/article/WARC-Exclusive/2025_Consumer_Trends_Report/en-GB/161373?
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.358)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Greg Schuey. I created this podcast to help D2C business owners and marketers who are stuck and who are trying to find a way to grow their businesses. Truthfully, I didn’t have a podcast scheduled to record until next week. However, this morning I read through the 58 pages of the WARC.
I don’t know if it’s WRC or work. I couldn’t tell you and GWI is 2025 consumer trends report and I felt the need to put something together for you today. My guess is is probably haven’t read through this report yet. First because it was published yesterday and second it’s behind a paywall, but I got access to that. It’s super packed with insights that every ecommerce company should be thinking about right now, so.
I want to take some time today and really dive into the five biggest takeaways that I got from the report. And I’ll be honest, two of them really shocked me. One of them absolutely floored me. And we’ll get into that here in just a little bit, but at the highest level, these trends are already reshaping how people shop, what they buy and who they trust. So let’s jump in. So the first trend, I would kind of label as
The wealth gap is changing how people spend. So we’re going to be talking about the widening cost of living gap. Uh, WRC highlighted, and I quote that the top 10 % of households are driving nearly half of all consumer spending in the U S let that sink in for just a minute. Like that stat is absolutely crazy, right? 10 % of households.
are driving nearly half of all consumer spending in the US. When we look at the flip side, right, the lower income households, they are continuing to get squeezed even more by inflation, tariffs, and rising prices. I can’t tell you how many brands that I buy from that I’ve gotten an email from in the last 90 days letting me know that they have to increase their prices. So you better buy now. I’m sure you’re probably exactly the same, or if you’re a brand marketer,
Greg Shuey (02:25.41)
You’ve probably sent this same email. it’s honestly a real problem that we have to face as brand owners, as marketers right now, spending power is down and unless something happens soon, it probably is going to continue to go down or at the very least it’s going to stay flat. And that is not great news for us as we head into Q4, which for most e-commerce brands, that is the busiest quarter.
of the year. So that’s a little bit scary. That’s something that we have to be thinking about. So what does this mean for us as marketers? So it means a couple of things. So first, there’s a huge divergence in how the different segments define value. So think about that budget conscious shoppers. They’re probably more than willing than ever before to switch brands if it saves them a few bucks. So this can be in the form of like a first time buyer discount.
So getting 15 % off your first order, or it could just be a product that is similar, but it’s just less expensive out of the gate. And so they’re going to be price sensitive and they’re going to be probably price shopping as we go into the holiday season. On the flip side, if we think about premium customers, they’re still spending. It’s like nothing has really changed. You know, they’re putting money on their credit cards. They’re using their debit cards cash and are still spending like they used to, but
A couple of things from what I got out of the report have changed a little bit. So they expect experience, they expect high quality, and they expect emotional connection. So those are a little different than what we’ve heard in the past. Customer experience, high quality, obviously, and then emotional connection. Their values have to align with your values.
And so making sure that you spend time really communicating those through all content that you produce is going to be critical. So my three key takeaways from, from this section are don’t market to the middle. It doesn’t really exist anymore. Either go high or go low. Personally, I would go high because obviously that’s where the money is. If you’re going low, you’re going to be competing at a race to the bottom.
Greg Shuey (04:47.366)
Second, rethinking your products and your pricing tiers. So are there some things that you can do to either one, create a more premium product or two pair down a little bit and create a more budget friendly product. And then obviously, you know, playing with your pricing to make sure that you still have good margin are able to generate a profit because that is the lifeblood of your business. But if you have some room to tinker there, that’s that’s going to be critical as well.
Lastly, spending time to build emotional brand equity to reduce price sensitivity and again, avoiding a race to the bottom. If you are building that brand equity and again, tying your values and creating emotion, people are going to be much less price sensitive because they are buying behind a cause or they are buying because of some kind of a vision that is being sold to them. And so those are three things that you really need to start leaning into.
So the second trend that I want to jump into next are consumers trust creators more than brands. This one really caught me off guard. Honestly, I’ve always been a skeptical about influencers, affiliates, creators, whatever you want to call them. Honestly, I think most of them are scam artists. That’s probably really mean to say, but especially those with huge followings that maybe have paid to get followers so they could
beef up their following and be able to charge more. Like I think they’re the worst, honestly. However, according to the report, nearly half of social media users have made a purchase in the last year because of an influencer recommendation. I can’t believe that. Can you? I for one, I’m not part of that group. I want, don’t like influencers, so I don’t follow influencers, but even if I did follow influencers, I wouldn’t trust what they’re pushing because they are getting compensated.
so, so yeah, it’s kind of mind boggling to me, honestly. One of the things that the report calls out is that it’s not just about reach. What really drives action is trust, which makes sense. Right. when, when we look at influencers and we say, my gosh, they’ve got, you know, 10 million followers and their reach must be insane. this is where it makes sense to me is like, okay, the trust piece of it. How many of those people
Greg Shuey (07:13.132)
actually trust this person? Are they a genuine human being who are genuinely talking about products that align with them and their values? And that makes sense. So consumers who buy based on influencer recommendations typically are the ones who see them as real, relatable people. That makes them powerful guides in the purchase journey. Okay. Again, that’s what makes sense to me. My three
key takeaways from this section are influencer marketing can’t be a checkbox and it also can’t be an afterthought, right? If you’re going to go into this, if you’re going to start leaning into TikTok creators, Instagram influencers, know, YouTube creators getting on Twitch and working with Twitch influencers, those types of things, right? It cannot be an activity where you just go and check a box that it has done.
Right. You need to go and you need to invest time into these relationships. You need to nurture them. You need to see them with the right products that are going to align with their audience so that they don’t sniff out that these people are a fraud, that the product doesn’t align with them. OK, so you have to be incredibly strategic about how you tackle that. The next thing is, is that you need to spend time.
creating long-term value aligned partnerships, especially with creators who have credibility in your niche. So instead of looking for reach, look for credibility. then lastly, which isn’t included in this report, but just something that I thought of as I was reading through it, I think your employees, team members, whatever you want to call them, and customers can also be an incredibly powerful voice for your business on the social platforms.
A lot of them have micro followings. A lot of them know who they work for, the products that they, you know, use day in and day out because they work for that business and that they are truly credible and trustworthy. So don’t overlook them. Don’t write them off. They could be a gold mine of potential, eyeballs, potential brand awareness, as well as potential traffic and revenue. Okay. This one floored me.
Greg Shuey (09:38.058)
So the third trend, AI assistants are quietly rewriting the funnel. OK, so if you think about the marketing funnel, which most of us have have taken basic marketing courses or understand this, we’ve got three phases of the funnel. We have top of funnel, which is high level awareness. We’re trying to create brand awareness. We have middle of the funnel, which is consideration, meaning that people have.
You know, learned of your brand. They’ve probably also learned of all of your competitors brand and now you’re in the consideration set. So they’re doing more research. They’re trying to figure out which one of those brands that they want to purchase from. And then bottom of the funnel is the decision making phase or the purchase phase. And that is where they decide on who they’re going to buy from. That is where they decide on the product that they’re going to buy. They start the checkout, they pull out their credit card, they make the transaction transaction.
Okay, over the last couple of years, that funnel and that buyer journey has gotten a little bit longer and a little bit more complex, but at the highest level, that’s what the funnel looks like. So when we’re talking about AI assistance, rewriting the funnel, this is what I mean. AI assistance like chat, GPT, Google Gemini perplexity, Claude, any of them, even Google’s new AI mode now.
One thing that I had not heard about until this morning, shame on me. Apparently this was launched back in January and was just recently integrated into chat GPT. I believe last week on the 17th is what I read. They have a new ish tool called operator. these tools and these chat bots are starting to do more than just chat and answer questions. They’re making decisions for users. Okay.
Think of this like a personal assistant. Apparently, operator are booking flights for people, ordering groceries for people, and of course they’re recommending products. And I know I’ve talked a lot about this one recently on the last couple of podcasts, is the product recommendation engine is just absolutely insane. But can you believe that it is booking flights for people and ordering groceries? I can’t, mind blown. Honestly, mind blown.
Greg Shuey (12:03.274)
So if you haven’t listened to my last two episodes, you should go listen to those because they’re going to be very telling about what you need to do to start performing well in the LLM site chat GPT. The simple truth is that if your brand doesn’t show up in those AI driven decisions, your brand is invisible, plain and simple, like no one will know that you’re there. No one will know what you offer. If you’re not showing up, that’s a huge problem.
this is a huge shift for SEO folks, a huge shift for paid search folks as well. Discovery is becoming delegated. Now, does that mean that every single human on this earth is using AI to, to do these kinds of activities? Absolutely not. I’m not. I would imagine it’s a small percentage of our population who is actually using it like that. However, that doesn’t mean that adoption isn’t going to be rapid.
That doesn’t mean that more and more people are going to start using this because they are. And so as a marketer, your job is no longer just to get in front of people. It is to get in front of the tools that they are trusting to make decisions for them. Like insane, right? So my three key takeaways for this section is one.
You need to start optimizing your site and your content for relevance and A.I. visibility, not just optimizing for traditional SEO and keyword rankings. OK, again, go listen to those last two episodes. Second, structure your data. So if you haven’t heard of schema markup, I’m hoping that most of you have. Go look into it. Schema is built into a lot of platforms these days like Shopify and other platforms. However, there is some schema.
that you can still mark up and wrap your content in that will help the search engines and help the LLMs be able to make better sense of your content, your information, as well as creating and optimizing frequently asked questions. Lastly, make sure your brand shows up in trustworthy sources that AI agents pull from. This isn’t just Google, it’s Reddit, it’s forums, it’s blogs, it’s YouTube, it’s all of these third party platforms.
Greg Shuey (14:24.896)
where people are having discussions and making product recommendations. So you’ve got to be part of the conversations happening in those areas as well. Trend four, which really wasn’t interesting to me because I’m not like a health nut by any means, but health is the new functional must have. OK, there was a whole section about health, health and wellness isn’t going away. In fact, it’s getting bigger and bigger by the day and it’s evolving super fast. So consumers, these are
specifically Gen Z and millennials who they called out in this study are prioritizing functional health benefits like gut health, immunity, energy, those types of things. They’re not just looking for healthy things or healthy supplements anymore. They are looking for those functional health benefits and then they want proof that your product actually does something specific for them. It’s not just like taking a multi-vitamin. want some, they want specific results
from your health or wellness supplement that you sell. So if you sell anything in the food space, if you sell anything in the supplements, skincare, or even home goods space, I know that’s kind of outside, but there are some things that happen in the home goods space that are tied into health and wellness. If you sell anything in those areas, my three key takeaways are you need to make your benefits specific and easy to understand and you
have to embed those into your PDPs. And they also called out including those in packaging as well. So like your package inserts and just really selling and leaning into those benefits that they’re going to get from using your product. The next thing is highlighting trending ingredients or health outcomes kind of ties back into that first one. And then the last one is if you’re going to lean into creators and influencers,
you need to partner with those who can speak authentically about the benefits they’ve specifically experienced. So real customer testimonials, when you get real customer testimonials, people who have actually used your product for a long time, most of these supplements and products like you can’t just use for two weeks and, see a result. Most of them take 60, 90 days to start seeing gains from these things. And so
Greg Shuey (16:48.994)
They’ve got to be talking about this for 60, 90 days before they’re really going to be trusted that, you know, they’re actually taking this testosterone booster or whatever, right? And that it is actually getting results for that individual. Okay, last one. So Community is the new channel. I love this one, honestly.
When I started my first e-commerce business back in 2019, one of the very first things that I did was go find the forums where Toyota Tacoma and Toyota Tundra owners were spending time online. Where are they asking questions? Where are they talking about their problems? And I went and I engaged, I built a community and a following on those platforms. I hate to say it’s the new channel, but I think more and more people, more and more brands are actually mass adopting this strategy. So,
you know, consumers, especially younger ones, you know, they’re not necessarily using search engines. They are using more interest-based communities, both online and offline. That’s where they’re spending their time. It’s not to say that they’ve completely stopped using Google. They’ve completely stopped using ChatGPT.
but they are seeking out like-minded people like them that they can engage with, that they can build relationships with, that they can network with, both online and offline. So think about it this way, right? We’ve got a local mountain bike meetup group in Utah County. It’s put on by a dude who runs an HR technology business, and he uses it as a networking event of people who love to mountain bike. And so mountain bike meetups, running groups,
Even digital platforms like Strava letterboxed private slack groups are also exploding in popularity. I don’t go a day without hearing about a private slack group for this or a private slack group for that. I wish and there may be, I wish there was a platform to help kind of surface these and figure out how to get into these private slack groups. and again, I haven’t looked, maybe there is, and maybe you can comment on,
Greg Shuey (19:02.582)
on this episode and share that. But just remember, these aren’t necessarily hobbyists, right? These are people who have a passion for a specific topic or thing. And by joining this quote unquote tribe of enthusiasts or advocates, they are now becoming part of this cohort that gives recommendations and tips and suggestions on products to buy. They’re buying tribes, right?
So my three key takeaways for our last section is spend time finding these micro communities and then working on building relationships with them and partnering with them. The second one is sponsoring experiences. So finding out if you can sponsor workshops, challenges, anything that brings people together through your product.
And then lastly, one of the things that I absolutely love from this report is that they highlighted something that Lego did. They built these Lego kits called Builds for Two. These were date night kits. So people who loved Legos, they were able to buy these date night kits and that was able to bring people together and then be able to help build the brand and also grow revenue. Like that’s the playbook for this.
And so what all of this means for you is we kind of wrap these up. these five trends aren’t just neat ideas or new ideas, right? If you read the entire report, which I recommend that you take the time, go over by the report, they’re backed by real research and data, and they are truly a blueprint for how you need to evolve your marketing in 2025 and beyond.
So as I kind of wrap things up and recap everything that we talked about on today’s episode, those five things are price sensitivity is rising, but so is demand for premium experiences. Creator trust drives conversions more than brand promises. AI assistants are changing the rules of discovery and decision-making. And then functional wellness is the new baseline for product marketing. And lastly, community is no longer a retention strategy. It’s top of funnel engine.
Greg Shuey (21:18.382)
If you can believe that, that’s crazy. It’s gone from bottom of the funnel to other side of the funnel as a retention tool to top of funnel. It’s crazy. The brands that adapt to these things, the fastest are going to be the ones who win going into, mean, what we’re a month into Q3. And so as we go into Q4, these are going to be the ones that absolutely crush it. And then they’re going to be the ones who are set up to have massive successes in 2026.
So in closing, I really hope that this episode was helpful. I hope it was insightful and that you were able to find two to three golden nuggets that were really ahas for you that you can then take and start implementing today. I hope that you take some time, review those past episodes that I talked about, and I hope you turn in again next week. Thanks again for joining.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
