The tricky job of understanding the desires and habits of an always-evolving consumer has taken on new complexity since the advent of artificial intelligence.
To get a read on this more selective consumer who has new AI-powered tools at their fingertips, WWD and BCG teamed on the Future of Fashion Report, which was introduced at the WWD Apparel and Retail CEO Summit in late October.
BCG surveyed more than 4,000 consumers, analyzed 9 million social media posts and interviewed top industry executives to dig deep on shopper spending priorities, behavior and brand engagement.
At the summit, Mrin Nayak, BCG’s North America fashion and luxury leader, said the research led to a “winning consumer algorithm” for a more selective world.
It’s a three-step analysis of the fashion landscape today, encompassing what drives choice, where consumers are shopping and how brands can win in the dawning age of AI.
What Matters to Consumers
Price, or at least value, has long been seen as among the top concerns of consumers.
But Nayak said BCG asked consumers about their most recent fashion purchase and what was most important to them and came up with a very different set of priorities.
“You see style and fit as number one and two [in importance], brand trust and relevance as three, quality as four, and price and promotion as five and six,” she said. “This is very different to what we would have seen a few years ago, with price and promotion really being at the top of that list.
“A selective consumer is not necessarily purely promotionally sensitive,” she said. “Belts are tightening, but selection criteria are shifting, with product really at the heart of [consumer] decision-making. They still want to look good and still want to feel cool. And while pricing and promotion strategies are important, they’re not necessarily sufficient to win with this very discerning consumer.”
Materials, fabric, craftsmanship and brand trust all matter in the luxury space, but also apparel and footwear, according to the study.
“In a world where so much of the discovery is happening online and in digital platforms, the question for brands is how can that proof of craftsmanship really travel and transcend?” Nayak said.
Mrin Nayak at the 2026 WWD Apparel and Retail CEO Summit held at Cipriani South Street on Oct. 27 in New York.
Allie Joseph/WWD
Connecting With Consumers
To successfully court consumers, fashion companies need to meet them where they are and at the right moment.
“If we think about the fastest scaling brands and the most successful turnarounds over the past few years, these are brands that have really been able to have much more focused plays around community, city and strategy and been able to disintermediate the relationship and go directly to the consumer,” Nayak said.
“Around 50 percent of consumers say the role a brand plays in culture is a really important decision criteria for them when they decide what to buy,” she said. “And that number is about two-thirds of consumers for the younger generation.”
Culture is no longer a differentiator for brands, but a prerequisite for engagement, she said.
The increasing desire to commune with consumers over sport is a good example.
“Nowhere is culture more alive than sport right now, especially with the summer of sport we’ve had this year, especially here in New York,” Nayak said. “Over 77 percent of fashion consumers engage with sport and sport culture and over half those consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that engages with sport or performance in some way.”
Winning in an AI World
Sebastian Boger, global fashion and luxury leader at BCG, took over to explain the tectonic shifts coming to the brand-consumer relationship with AI.
“The way the consumer shops is drastically changing,” Boger said, acknowledging that can be both exciting and scary.
But Boger said consumers are still mixed when it comes to brands using AI, whether it’s customer service chatbots to advertising images made by machine.
One-third of consumers don’t like it when brands use AI and another third of those surveyed said the use of AI could positively influence their purchasing decisions.
But consumers are more definitive when it comes to making their own lives easier with the new tech.
“Consumers are more or less starting nine out of 10 purchase journeys by using a large language model or an agent,” Boger said. “Eight out of 10 consumers are trusting an agent with their recommendation and, from that interface, usually do only very few of their own clicks in order to end up at a brand environment. Six out of 10 are even using an agent without any further clicks into a branded environment.”
But so far, only 4 percent of consumers would let an agent complete a purchase on its own.
“When it comes to making final purchase decisions, consumers are not there yet,” he said. “The ‘not yet’ is very important in this sentence because this might change over time quite drastically.
“We are moving very drastically away from search engine optimization to generative engine optimization, which is a problem because I think this industry has now trained for years people in marketing departments how to run effective search engine models,” Boger said. “Instead of bidding for search terms, you need to understand, as a brand, what prompts are consumers putting into those large language models. That’s a completely different discipline and needs to be learned now quickly.”
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