For brand marketers, 2026 reinforced a difficult reality: driving commerce growth is no longer just about reaching more shoppers or investing in more media. It's about understanding which investments are creating demand, where that demand is converting, and whether the resulting growth is profitable.
Throughout the year, brands navigated increasingly fragmented shopper journeys, pressure to demonstrate the value of commerce media investments, and rapid advances in AI. While these challenges aren't new, the expectations around how quickly teams can respond to them have changed.
Conversations with leaders from Unilever, Mizkan, Made by Gather, Monster Energy, Bel Brands, and Mark Anthony Group during MikMak's 2026 Commerce Growth Summits in February and October offered a unique perspective on how commerce priorities evolved throughout the year. While the challenges remained familiar, the conversations increasingly focused on turning insights into action and connecting marketing investments to meaningful business outcomes.
Together, these perspectives highlight a growing need for brands to rethink how they measure success, use data, and connect their marketing efforts to business growth. As brands look ahead to 2027, four priorities stand out as essential to building smarter, more profitable commerce strategies.
1. Prioritize Profitable Growth Over Isolated Marketing Metrics
For years, marketing performance has been evaluated through a combination of impressions, engagement, traffic, and return on ad spend (ROAS). These metrics remain important, but they don't always answer the question business leaders are asking: Are our investments contributing to profitable growth?
As access to more granular commerce media, shopper, and retail sales data expanded in 2026, so did expectations around marketing accountability. Brands have more opportunities to understand how their investments influence actual sales, but turning that data into a consistent view of performance remains a challenge.
During MikMak's February Commerce Growth Summit, Annie Plunkett, Traffic & Media Manager at Made by Gather, highlighted the difficulty of comparing performance across retailers when each operates within its own measurement environment. Without a consistent view, determining where to increase or reallocate investment becomes more complicated.
What This Means for 2027
The next step in marketing budget optimization is to evaluate investments as part of the broader cost of driving profitable growth, rather than treating each channel or partner as a separate measure of success.
For brands, this means looking beyond which campaigns or retailers deliver the strongest individual returns and examining how media, agency, broker, and retailer investments collectively influence sales and profitability. A campaign with a strong ROAS may still be a less attractive investment when the full cost of supporting that growth is considered.
As brands plan for 2027, the opportunity is to use this broader view to make more informed trade-offs: where additional investment is justified, where spending may be duplicative, and where reallocating resources could deliver stronger returns across the business.
2. Make Commerce Intelligence Accessible and Actionable Across Teams
The challenge for many commerce teams isn't a lack of data. It's the time and effort required to turn that data into decisions.
Media platforms, retailer reporting, shopper insights, and internal analytics often provide different views of performance. When those insights remain disconnected, teams can spend more time reconciling information than identifying opportunities and acting on them.
As the volume of available data grows, the ability to access and apply insights quickly becomes increasingly important. This requires more than consolidated reporting. Teams need access to relevant information within their everyday workflows, without depending on lengthy reporting processes or a handful of specialists to interpret results.
During MikMak's October Commerce Growth Summit, Aaron Sobol, Head of NA Media Investment and Data Governance at Unilever, highlighted the value of making insights available programmatically, so teams can access the information they need without repeatedly relying on others to retrieve it. The opportunity is to give people more time to focus on strategic decisions and business outcomes, rather than the mechanics of gathering data.
What This Means for 2027
Brands should focus on bringing commerce intelligence into the workflows where decisions are already being made, from campaign planning and marketing budget optimization to in-flight adjustments. Rather than waiting for reports to be compiled or relying on analysts to answer every question, teams should be able to access relevant insights when they need them.
The opportunity is to shorten the time between identifying a performance issue and taking action. That could mean recognizing when demand is shifting between retailers, identifying underperforming investments earlier, or reallocating budgets while there's still time to influence results.
3. Focus AI Investments on Practical Business Value
AI dominated conversations across marketing and commerce in 2026. But as capabilities expanded, so did the need to distinguish which promising opportunities deliver meaningful business results from shiny new objects that lack substance.
For brands, AI's ability to automate routine tasks and improve efficiency is already valuable. The next opportunity is using it to improve the decisions that influence commercial performance. Whether identifying opportunities to optimize media budgets, forecasting potential campaign outcomes, or testing different investment scenarios before committing resources, AI is helping brands evaluate options and make more informed commercial decisions.
Amy Luke Busker of Mizkan reinforced this perspective during MikMak's October Commerce Growth Summit, describing how AI-driven productivity can create opportunities for stronger commercial judgment. By enabling teams to test scenarios, challenge assumptions, and evaluate commercial viability more quickly, AI can help businesses move beyond efficiency gains toward more informed decisions and greater collaboration.
Watch the full conversation from MikMak's October Commerce Growth Summit here.
What This Means for 2027
With growing expectations for teams to leverage AI, marketing and commerce leaders have an opportunity to be strategic about where they apply it. Rather than prioritizing adoption for its own sake, the focus should be on use cases with the greatest potential to improve commercial performance.
This means evaluating AI investments not only by the time they save, but also by the decisions and outcomes they improve. Can AI help teams identify underperforming media investments earlier, evaluate the potential impact of shifting budgets, or recognize changes in retailer demand before opportunities are missed?
Equally important is ensuring teams have the context and confidence to act on AI-generated insights. Combining AI's analytical capabilities with human expertise and commercial judgment can help brands turn faster analysis into stronger decisions and measurable results.
4. Adapt Your Commerce Strategy to AI-Powered Discovery and Shopping
For years, brands have invested in search visibility, social media, and retailer presence to ensure their products appear where consumers are looking. But as AI-powered search and shopping experiences evolve, the way shoppers find, compare, and purchase products is changing.
Consumers are already using AI tools to describe what they're looking for, compare options, and receive product recommendations based on their specific needs. For brands, this introduces a new consideration: whether AI systems have access to the accurate product and retailer information needed to recommend relevant products and help shoppers take the next step toward purchasing.
This shift creates challenges beyond traditional search visibility. A product might be relevant to a shopper's request, but incomplete product information, outdated pricing, or limited visibility into retailer availability could make it harder for AI-powered experiences to provide useful recommendations and purchase options.
As these experiences become more sophisticated, brands need to consider how their existing commerce infrastructure supports a shopping journey that increasingly involves both human consumers and AI agents.
What This Means for 2027
In 2027, marketing and commerce teams should make AI-powered discovery and shopping an active part of their commerce strategies, ensuring product information and retailer data can support how consumers are already finding and evaluating products.
This means looking beyond traditional search visibility to assess whether AI experiences can access accurate product descriptions, attributes, pricing, availability, and relevant retailer options.
With AI search optimization still evolving, brands should also prioritize continuous learning and experimentation. This includes staying informed about emerging best practices, testing how products appear in AI-generated recommendations, and evaluating tools that can help identify visibility gaps, prioritize improvements, and measure progress over time.
Closer collaboration between marketing, eCommerce, and technology teams will also be important as brands determine how to make product and retailer information more accessible across AI-powered shopping experiences.
The opportunity for 2027 is not simply to establish a presence in AI-powered discovery, but to continuously improve how products are represented, recommended, and connected to relevant purchase opportunities as the technology and consumer behavior evolve.
What Commerce Leaders Should Prioritize in 2027
If 2026 demonstrated anything, it's that brands need to connect the decisions being made across their organizations, from where budgets are invested to how performance is measured and how shoppers ultimately purchase.
As you prepare your 2027 commerce strategy, pressure-test your approach against four questions:
✓ Measure the Full Cost of Growth: Can you evaluate marketing and commercial investments based on their contribution to profitable growth, rather than relying solely on channel-specific metrics?
✓ Make Commerce Intelligence Actionable: Can the teams responsible for decisions access and act on intelligence data without extensive manual reporting?
✓ Prioritize AI That Improves Commercial Decisions: Are your AI investments solving specific business problems and improving commercial outcomes?
✓ Adapt to AI-Powered Product Discovery: Are you actively testing, learning, and evaluating tools to improve how your products are discovered, recommended, and connected to purchase opportunities through AI?
The opportunity in 2027 isn't simply to collect more data, adopt more technology, or activate more channels. It's to make those investments work together to drive measurable business growth.
Want to hear from industry leaders? Watch the summit on-demand and explore how leading brands are navigating commerce challenges and planning for growth.
