Top DTC trends for 2023 and beyond: What experts think

Cholë predicts:

1. Climate crisis will lead the change:

Companies will need to start getting serious about the climate crisis because their customers, employees, and suppliers are getting serious about it, despite the cost of living crisis.

This is an opportunity for DTC brands to show their commitment to tackling climate challenges by making their products and services more eco-friendly, and changing their business model and suppliers to be as supportive to tackling climate change as possible.

This will build greater trust in their customer base and create stronger loyalty compared to brands that don't acknowledge or act on this.

2. Creativity will top the charts:

There will be an accelerating shift to high-quality creative (message, text, imagery) rather than relying on targeting. Across platforms – not just on Facebook. Driven both by consumer behaviour, the privacy shifts, and the sheer amount of marketing noise.

Aaron stresses on:

1. Importance of storytelling:

The future belongs to brands who can blend a single story — not their story, but the story their audience already inhabits — across multiple “rented” channels and drive them to an owned location: i.e., closed-community platforms, consistently returning visitors (plus, shoppers), and the almighty email list.

Unfortunately, “story” is a dangerous word in marketing, especially in e-commerce, where the transactional nature of most purchases makes frontloading your story a double-edged sword.

Rather than me, me, me — us, us, us — stories that sell shouldn’t center on the brand. Instead, brands must enter the stories their audience already inhabits.

The only exception is a founder story – where there’s deep, emotional, and narrative overlap with the audience. “When I see them, I see me,” has to be the sentiment. Customers don’t care about how someone built a business. They care about what that business can do for them.

When brands make customers their hero, it’s their pains and problems that create drama. The business’s role is to aid and support.

Think of it as a conversation. Brands establish empathy by clearly identifying what their audience already wants. Only then can a brand sell itself as an easier, more effective, faster, or better way to deliver that preexisting desire.

2. LTV calculations

Everyone talks about LTV — especially LTV:CAC ratio. Very few, however, focus on customer contribution margin by SKU in tight (60–90 day) windows. It’s not the e-commerce industry’s fault. Most brands are hungry for insight. The problem is no native e-commerce dashboard, let alone paid-media platform, includes LTV calculations.

Thankfully, there are a host of new analytics apps that unite a store’s disparate data sources.

Savvy owners and operators not only know their LTV but optimize customer acquisition to push efficiency to the end of breaking. Why? Because whoever can front the highest CAC while remaining profitable, will win.

3. Social commerce may be nothing but hype

Without a doubt, the most overhyped trend right now is “native social commerce” — in-app purchases directly through social media platforms. Despite a flood of product releases, significant mentions in the mainstream press, and notable inclusion in nearly every “trends” report –  customers simply aren’t buying.

According to eMarketer,  79% of users in the US have yet to make a native social-commerce purchase. Many sources cite its rise in China as evidence of inevitability. Still, numerous factors — like mobile-first commerce, a universal digital wallet, and the dominance of online marketplace baked into social platforms — mean we’re at least one to two buying generations away from US adoption. For now, resist the temptation to invest.