2025 Marketing Greatest Hits: 23 Top Tracks to Help You Nail Your New-Year Strategy

Welcome to your 2025 Marketing Wrapped.

This year, marketers hit play on thousands of articles, reports, webinars, and customer stories — but a few tracks rose above the rest. The ones you replayed. Shared. Bookmarked. Sent to your team with, “We need to do this.”
So we took those chart-toppers and turned them into four albums: Personalization, Loyalty, Engagement, and Digital Strategy.

And this blog?

This is your All-Stars Playlist, the standout insights that defined how brands connected, converted, and grew in 2025.

Across all four albums, the theme was impossible to miss: customers moved faster, expectations climbed higher, and the brands that kept up were the ones remixing data, channels, AI, and creativity into something that actually hits.

So as you plan your 2026 strategy, consider this your marketing Wrapped:
your most-played insights, your top genres (personalization, loyalty, engagement, DTC), and the deep cuts that deserve another spin.

Let’s hit play. 🎶

If marketing in 2025 had a genre, personalization was the headliner. From AI-powered recommendations to predictive journeys, this was the album everyone kept coming back to.

Across the Personalization Greatest Hits, one thing became clear: the bar has moved. Customers expect relevance instantly, consistently, and across every channel. The brands that delivered on those expectations used AI as a creative engine for building truly unique, personalized experiences.

Here were the tracks that topped the charts:

TRACK 1: “AI of the Tiger” 🐅🤖

Marketers returned to this track for clear, practical examples of AI-powered personalization, showing how intent and behavior can be translated into meaningful action.

👉 Future-Ready Retail: 16 AI Use Cases in E-Commerce

TRACK 2: “Personalization Rhapsody” 🎶✨

A challenge-led framework that helped brands design structured, scalable 1:1 experiences. This track became a go-to for teams building consistency across channels.

👉 The Personalization Playbook

TRACK 3: “AI Heard It Through the Grapevine” 🍇🤖

Industry specialists shared how AI is shaping expectations, reducing friction, and unlocking new dimensions of relevance.

👉 Asking the Experts: How AI Is Reshaping Loyalty and Customer Experience

TRACK 4: “AI Saw the Sign” 👁️🤖

Data from 10,000 consumers and 1,250 marketers revealed how AI influences real-world decision-making. This track gave marketers the clarity they needed to invest with confidence.

👉  AI in Retail Global Report

TRACK 5: “Stack to the Future” 🛠️⏩

A practical exploration of how real-time behavior and predictive signals can power more intelligent, responsive customer interactions.

👉 How to Transform Your Commerce Stack Into a Personalization Powerhouse

TRACK 6: “Don’t Stop Retrievin’” 🔄📈

A favorite among lifecycle marketers. This track focused on extending personalization beyond the first purchase and strengthening long-term loyalty.

👉 The Retention Rate Playbook

Ready for the next album? Up next: Loyalty Anthology — the tracks that kept customers coming back. 🎶

If personalization was the headliner, loyalty was the slow-burning favorite that stayed at the top of everyone’s playlist. 

With customers rethinking who they trust and why, marketers turned to the resources that helped them build relationships rooted in value, connection, and consistency. 

The Loyalty Anthology captures the tracks that defined how brands nurtured long-term engagement in 2025.

Here are the fan favorites from the album:

TRACK 1: “Can’t Help Falling in Loyalty” 💕

Marketers returned to this track for a clear view of modern loyalty. The six loyalty types, including the rise of Trend Loyalty, helped teams understand not just how customers behave but what keeps them committed.

🎧👉 Customer Loyalty Index 2025 — Global Edition

TRACK 2: “Right Here, Right Now” ⚡

Brands leaned into this track for guidance on activating real-time signals. It offered a closer look at how leading teams translated intent into meaningful moments that strengthened retention and repeat purchase.

🎧👉 Loyalty at Scale: Strategies and Use Cases for Real-Time Engagement

TRACK 3: “Stand By Me” 🤝

This track showcased how two global players united digital, shopper, and retail teams to deliver consistent experiences. Marketers replayed it for inspiration on breaking down internal silos.

🎧👉 How Mondelez and Unilever Are Winning Consumer Loyalty in 2025

TRACK 4: “With a Little Help from My Friends” 🌱

A standout for brands exploring community-driven advocacy. This track revealed how Huel turned loyal fans into an engine for sustainable, organic growth.

🎧👉 How Huel Built a Self-Sustaining Referral Ecosystem

TRACK 5: “Strategy Baby One More Time” 🎤

A highlight reel of practical learnings from marketers at Bayer, Hershey, and SodaStream. This track resonated with teams searching for proven ideas they could put into motion quickly.

🎧👉 13 Actionable Engagement Strategies from the Loyalty Masterclass Panel

TRACK 6: “Sweet Child o’ Mine” 🍬

A case study in transforming fragmented data into meaningful customer relationships. Marketers replayed this track for its lessons on turning engagement into long-term loyalty.

🎧👉 How Ferrara Sweetened Customer Engagement Through Direct Consumer Relationships

Up next: The Engagement Mix Tape, your album for crafting connected, friction-free journeys across every moment that matters. 🎶

Customer journeys became more complex than ever in 2025. 

People moved between channels, devices, and moments in unpredictable ways, often within the same hour. 

The brands that kept customers engaged were the ones that stayed connected throughout the chaos, and this album captured the insights that helped marketers do exactly that.

These are the tracks that shaped engagement strategies this year:

TRACK 1: “Know Your Own Way” 🧭📊

A clear look at how people browse, compare, buy, return, and re-engage. This track gave marketers the grounding they needed to design journeys based on real behavior rather than assumptions.

🎧👉 17+ Omnichannel Retail Statistics Marketers Need to Know in 2026

TRACK 2: “Donut Stop Me Now” 🍩⚡

A standout example of how one brand unified channels and streamlined engagement. This track became a source of inspiration for teams seeking practical omnichannel wins.

🎧👉 How Krispy Kreme Used Omnichannel Strategies to Sweeten the Customer Experience

TRACK 3: “On the Road Again” 🚗🔄

A guided look at how a customer moves from discovery to repeat purchase. Marketers replayed this track to understand how consistency across the lifecycle creates stronger outcomes.

🎧👉 CPG Solutions Tour: A Connected Consumer Journey

TRACK 4: “Click This Way” 🖱️🎤

A deep-dive session on navigating today’s evolving engagement ecosystem. This track helped marketers connect the dots across channels, teams, and data sources.

🎧👉 The Next Era of Consumer Engagement: Shopper Marketing, Retail Media, and First-Party Data

TRACK 5: “The Times They Are A-Changin’” 🔁📈

A forward-looking track that highlighted the emerging shifts shaping next year. From phygital journeys to social commerce and AI, this one kept marketers ready for what comes next.

🎧👉 8 CPG Marketing Trends to Watch in 2026

TRACK 6: “Brand Don’t Impress Me Much” 🤷‍♀️🛒

Fresh research that challenged long-held assumptions about customer decision-making. This track resonated with teams exploring how to design journeys around real intent.

🎧👉 Consumers Buy the Product, Not the Brand

Up next: The Digital Strategy Essentials Collection, the album for shaping smarter growth and strengthening your DTC motion. 🎶📈

2025 challenged every DTC brand to rethink how customers discover, evaluate, buy, and advocate. 

Rising acquisition costs, shifting expectations, and increasingly complex digital ecosystems meant growth required more than great products. It required clarity, adaptability, and a strategy built for how people actually shop.

The Digital Strategy Essentials album brought together the tracks that helped marketers cut through noise and build momentum, no matter their size or starting point.

Here are the tracks that defined the playlist:

TRACK 1: “You Give Growth a Good Name” 🎸📦

A behind-the-scenes look at how a heritage brand modernized its DTC engine while strengthening long-standing retail relationships. This track inspired teams seeking growth without sacrificing key partnerships.

🎧👉 From Riffs to Revenue: How Gibson Scaled DTC While Amplifying Partnerships

TRACK 2: “Break on Through (To the DTC Side)” 🚪🚀

A punchy exploration of the most common blockers slowing DTC performance. Marketers replayed this one for its practical strategies that helped brands overcome operational, technical, and channel challenges.

🎧👉 5 Barriers Holding CPG DTC Brands Back (And How to Break Them)

TRACK 3: “Start Me Up” 🔋🛒

A focused guide on building evergreen journeys, starting small, and scaling intentionally. This track resonated with emerging DTC teams looking for a roadmap that reduced complexity while supporting long-term growth.

🎧👉 Tips for CPG Brands Starting Out With DTC

TRACK 4: “Enter CRM-Man” 🦸‍♂️💻

Proof that DTC thinking is not limited to consumer brands. Marketers turned to this track to understand how a B2B powerhouse used personalization and journey design to create a more intuitive digital experience.

🎧👉 How Online Metals Trailblazed a Consumer-Grade B2B Experience

TRACK 5: “Tell Me What You Want (What You Really, Really Want)” 🗣️📊

A clear, research-backed look at where expectations fall out of sync. This track helped teams identify gaps, refine messaging, and align digital experiences with what customers actually value.

🎧👉 The 4 Biggest Disconnects Between Marketers and Consumers

Together, these tracks reflected a core truth of 2025: digital growth belongs to the brands that stay flexible, data-aware, and customer-led. The teams who embraced this album left with sharper strategies, smarter journeys, and a clearer path to scale.

And with that, the Greatest Hits Collection comes to a close — four albums, twenty-three standout tracks, and a year’s worth of insights to carry into 2026. 🎶✨