The state of retail operations: Encodify launches survey on the future of go-to-market technology

What are the biggest challenges in retail operations right now? Is it content creation, managing collaborations, compliance or something entirely different? That’s what we’re looking to find out.

Encodify spent the first half of 2025 talking to go-to-market stakeholders at a number of Scandinavian retailers. What we’ve heard so far is that their teams spend too much time on reviews and approvals, that even small retailers are generating an extreme amount of asset variations to support different markets and channels, and that product information management impacts everything from label design to packaging compliance.

If you want to know more about what we’ve learned so far, you can find a summary further down on this page, but our research is not done yet.

We want to find out which challenges the retail industry and its stakeholders are facing on a global scale, so we’re expanding our research to include retailers from EU and the UK.

So we need your help. We want to hear from everyone involved in retail operations, from category managers and designers to product owners, system administrators and even manufacturers, brands and agencies.

And when the survey is over, we’ll of course share our findings with all of you. You can fill out the survey and sign up to receive the report here.

Initial findings: Retailers are facing three primary challenges in 2025

In the initial stages of our survey ‘The State of Retail Operations: A Survey On The Future of Go-To Market Technology’, we talked to different stakeholders working with retail operations or go-to-market technology at a number of Scandinavian retailers, and this talks have led us to three tentative conclusions about the challenges that the retail industry is facing right now.

1. Reviews, approvals and collaboration is a major time sink

2. Retailers need to generate the same asset in many different variations

3. Aligning access to product information across stakeholders is a bigger challenge than ever.

The next step of the survey is to put these conclusions to the test. Are the responses from the first survey participants echoed by a wider group of respondents, or are there other challenges which are more relevant?

You can find more details on what we’ve learned so far, and help us by filling out the survey.

1. Reviews, approvals and collaboration is a major time sink

The pros and cons of using AI for content creation is already a heavily debated subject, but what we’ve found is that creating content isn’t what takes up the most time for the average team.

Instead, it’s review rounds, approval time and collaboration between the different stakeholders who have a vested interest in the content that is being generated.

Because of that, the often lower quality of AI generated content may actually have an opposite effect than intended. While it does speed up the initial content creation, it can often slow down the overall production process as more review rounds are needed to get the asset over the finish line.

For retailers with big content teams and established review and approval processes in place the trade-off may be fairly even, meaning the time gained from quicker content creation is balanced with the added time an asset spends in review.

But for mid-size and smaller retailers the impact can be massive. As they start to generate everything from digital and print assets to packaging designs and labels at a scale befitting a global corporation, any holes or inefficiencies in review and approval processes will slow down the process, almost exponentially so.

And from the interviews we’ve had it’s been evident that even large national retailers have challenges when it comes to review and approval speed.

2. Retailers need to generate the same asset in many different variations

Between in-store promotions, print, e-commerce, and social media for different platforms, the average retailer is already spread thin when it comes to generating asset variations.

Even if the messaging and the content format is the same, there’s still a need to create asset variations.

The technical requirements for a video aren’t even the same across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. And retailers and brands also need to generate variations for different content formats such as labels, in-store signs, a weekly newspaper, or a webshop.

On top of this, many retailers who used to cater to a local or regional customer base have seen their audiences expand nation-wide, or even global. This means that everything from customer service emails to banners and commercials need to account for even more asset variations than previously.

3. Aligning access to product information across stakeholders is a challenge

Managing product information is in no way a new discipline for retailers, but what we’ve found is that it is becoming an increasingly big challenge.

And it’s not because retailers don’t have systems in place for things like storage tracking, product variations or SKUs which are commonly found in product information management systems.

New regulations like the packaging and packaging waste directive, food contact materials regulation, and general product safety regulations, means it’s not solely label designers and product owners who need access to product information. It’s everyone from manufacturers to compliance officers and legal representation.

Is your experience different?

The challenges we’ve mentioned here were pinpointed through interviews with stakeholders at a number of Scandinavian retailers. The talks were focused on the problems they face right now, what would be their primary focus going into 2026, and what challenges they were expecting to take up most of their time in the future.

You can participate in the second part of the survey here to help us create an overview of the state of retail operations on a global scale. You will also be able to sign up for an in-depth interview which dives even further into the questions of retail operations and collaboration.

Even if you aren’t interested in participating you can sign up to receive the final report when the survey is concluded.