This is the second part in a series meant to help globally-ambitious brands and retailers to navigate budget barriers when looking to buy a solution that improves their onsite customer experience.

“We’ll have a budget for this in the future.”

Great!  You’re planning to build out a budget and maybe even a timeline for it. Successful businesses always plan, so this could be a good approach to managing your budget issues. Or maybe not.

We’ve been incredibly impressed by the resourcefulness of many brands and retailers we work with that flawlessly navigate this particular situation. Once these brands recognize the value of our platform, they become determined to work around a barrier that would delay their time to market in rolling out an innovative solution that drives customer engagement and loyalty. They realize that moving faster than their competition is worth creating a budget sooner rather than later.

And here’s why: there’s a high opportunity cost. The beauty, health, and wellness industries are growing rapidly. In fact, according to Precedence Research, the global Health and Wellness Market, which includes beauty and other related categories, are estimated to grow from roughly $4.9 trillion in 2022 to upwards of $7.6 trillion by 2030. This steady, upwards trajectory for the industry is compelling to say the least.

But this type of growth creates more competition.  We’re seeing an ever-increasing number of new players coming onto the scene abetting the growth of this industry.

Traditional large brands are coming up against nimble, digital-first companies breaking into many different markets simultaneously and dominating specific audience segments as they expand. Their strategy is to spread like wildfire across the globe, dominate social media, and leverage every possible channel to win. And many of these newer brands embrace new personalization tech quickly to accelerate their growth.

But these young brands aren’t impervious to the competition either. They are tackling the challenge of building awareness so they can expand quickly and gain market share against renowned big brands with more clout. On the flip side, these brands will come up against even younger, burgeoning companies that the market sees as the new hot trend and ardently praise. If these digital-first brands don’t move quickly to embrace personalization tech, they’ll fall behind these new feverishly ambitious, nascent competitors.

Brands and retailers of all sizes can’t afford to wait. Losing momentum against the competition is often the most compelling reason to push the future forward and make an investment now.  This scenario can also be solved with strong financial acuity to negotiate favorable payment terms that can accommodate upcoming budget cycles (we’ll cover that more in the next post in this series). Brands and retailers we work with realize the benefits of accelerating their time to market with new personalization tools and features and thus find creative ways to carve out a budget as soon as they can.