Marketing

From gut feel to ground truth: How AI is reshaping the in-store experience

In-store events represent one of retail's most significant investments and one of its least-interrogated planning processes. Most brands approach activation strategy the same way they approach media planning: they look at who their customers are on paper and assume they know what those customers want in person.

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June 22, 2026 by Leslie Walsh — Head of Strategy, RYA

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Think about the last time your brand planned an in-store event. A product launch activation, a pop-up experience, a community gathering, a live demonstration. At some point in the planning process, someone in the room said, "Our customers would love this."

But how did you know?

Most in-store activations — even well-funded ones — begin the same way: a combination of category instinct, competitive observation, and educated guessing. The event looks great on paper. The brand alignment feels right. The creative team is excited. Then it happens, and foot traffic is lower than projected, engagement is tepid, and the post-event debrief is full of explanations for why the audience "wasn't quite right."

The problem was rarely the execution. It was the assumption.

The expensive gap between assumption and audience

Demographics tell you age, income, and geography. Purchase data tells you what customers have already bought. Neither tells you what they actually care about: what they'd choose to do on a Saturday afternoon, which cultural communities they belong to, or what kind of experience would make them drive past three competitors to get to your store.

That gap between what brands assume and what audiences actually want is where in-store activations go to underperform. In a retail environment where consumers have more choices than ever about how they spend their time — and where a mediocre in-store experience reinforces the case for staying home — the cost of that gap is rising.

AI moves into the planning room

A new class of audience intelligence is changing this equation at the very beginning of the planning process, before a single venue is booked or an activation brief is written.

These tools don't pull from CRM records or purchase history alone. They draw from behavioral signals at scale: what audiences want to do with their extra time and money, which cultural communities they participate in, where they seek entertainment, connection, and discovery.

The result is a fundamental shift in how the planning question gets asked. Instead of "what kind of event fits our brand?" the question becomes "what kind of experience does this specific audience actually want?" Those are not always the same question. And the answer to the second one is better.

What this looks like in practice

The difference shows up most clearly in the ideas that look counterintuitive on the surface but turn out to be exactly right.

A financial services brand wanted to make an impact at a major industry event. The standard playbook would have called for branded swag, a polished demo station, or a sponsored keynote. Audience intelligence told a different story: this customer segment over-indexed heavily on music culture and creative experiences. The activation that emerged? Custom pressed EDM vinyls tied to the brand's product story. This had nothing to do with finance and everything to do with what that audience actually cared about. It worked precisely because it felt unexpected but earned.

An auto lending company, working from the same kind of audience insight, created a dating show that matched singles with both a car and a partner. A travel brand launched a cruise ship with a global digital treasure hunt that hid Google Maps clues across the web, transforming a product debut into a game its audience couldn't put down.

None of these ideas came from a standard brief. They came from understanding what audiences want to do, not just what they're expected to buy.

For retailers, the same logic applies. The question isn't just "what kind of event should we host?" It's "are our customers foodies who'd show up for a chef collaboration? Financial advisors who are also music fans and into vinyl records? Parents looking for an experience they can't replicate at home?" Audience intelligence surfaces those overlaps before a dollar is spent on production, and the activation that results feels less like a brand moment and more like something designed specifically for the people walking through the door.

The bar has moved

Consumers today are not short on options. An in-store event competes not just with other retail experiences, but with every form of entertainment available from a couch. The brands winning in-store right now aren't necessarily spending the most on production value. They're the ones who understood their audience specifically enough to design an experience those people couldn't get anywhere else.

The data makes the stakes clear in both directions. According to Event Marketer, 66% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand after interacting with it at a live event — meaning the upside of a well-executed activation is real and measurable. But PwC's 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 29% of consumers stopped doing business with brands after a bad experience either online or in-person. A forgettable activation doesn't just waste a budget. It erodes a relationship you spent years building.

That depth of understanding used to take six to eight weeks of research and synthesis. AI-powered audience intelligence compresses it to days — sometimes hours — while going deeper into behavioral nuance than traditional research ever could.

The guesswork isn't just inefficient. In a market where the cost of a forgettable activation is a customer who decides it's not worth the trip next time, it's a risk retailers can no longer afford to absorb.

In-store retail isn't dying. But the era of activations planned on instinct and validated by hope is. The brands that will win the next decade of physical retail are the ones building experiences from the inside out, starting with what their audiences actually want, not what a demographic profile suggests they might.

The best activation or in-store experience isn't the most expensive one. It's the one that makes a customer feel like you actually know them.

Now, you can.

About Leslie Walsh

Leslie Walsh is Head of Strategy at RYA, an audience intelligence platform that helps marketers make faster, data-backed creative decisions. Her agency background includes brand and digital strategy for MINI Cooper, Nestlé, Oscar Mayer, and AT&T.

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