Every expansion decision a brand makes in the second half of 2026 is a bet — on a market, a price, a location, a customer. Retail market research is how the best brands stop guessing and start stacking the odds. Done well, it’s not a report that sits in a drawer; it’s the engine that points growth capital at the markets and stores most likely to pay it back.
Retail market research is the systematic gathering and analysis of data about customers, competitors, and markets to guide decisions — from pricing and assortment to which markets to enter and where to open. In 2026 it increasingly blends traditional consumer research with location intelligence: demographic and psychographic profiling, mobile foot-traffic data, AI-driven demand modeling, and sales forecasting.
Reading the Market in H2 2026
The headline numbers are encouraging: the National Retail Federation projects U.S. retail sales will grow 4.4% in 2026 to $5.6 trillion, ahead of the 3.6% ten-year average, and more than 55% of retail and real-estate leaderstold Placer.ai they’re confident in brick-and-mortar over the coming year. But the growth is uneven — a K-shaped consumer means higher-income households are driving a disproportionate share, while value-focused shoppers stay cautious. Averages hide that split. Research is how a brand sees past the headline to the specific markets and customers that actually fit.
Pricing Strategies, Grounded in Data
Pricing is one of the fastest levers research can move. Retail pricing strategies — from everyday-low-price to premium, dynamic, or value-tier positioning — only work when they match what a local market will actually bear. Research reveals price sensitivity by trade area, what competitors charge nearby, and how a brand’s target customer weighs price against quality and convenience. In 2026, “value” rarely means cheapest; it means the right intersection of price, quality, and convenience for that specific customer. Getting that read wrong in a new market is a quiet but expensive mistake.
From Data to Decisions: Retail Analytics
Retail analytics solutions are where research becomes operational. The shift that matters most is from descriptive analytics — dashboards reporting what already happened — to predictive analytics that estimate what’s likely next. Gartner expects global AI spending to top $2.5 trillion in 2026, much of it flowing into demand forecasting and customer analytics. For a growing brand, the highest-value application is integrating analytics with market research so the same data that explains the past also forecasts a new market’s potential — not as two disconnected exercises, but one continuous pipeline from insight to decision.
Scaling a brand across many markets multiplies the cost of a bad assumption. Research applied once, then reused as a repeatable framework — the same customer profile, the same scoring criteria, the same forecasting method across every candidate market — is what lets a brand grow without re-litigating each decision from scratch. It’s the difference between expanding on momentum and expanding on evidence.
Shopper Insights: Knowing the Customer
Shopper insights research uncovers the whybehind behavior — the motivations, preferences, and trade-offs that surveys, transaction data, and foot-traffic patterns reveal together. The most useful techniques in 2026 pair stated preference (what customers say in surveys) with revealed preference (where they actually go, captured through aggregated mobile data). That combination shows not just who a brand’s best customers are, but where else they spend time — the cross-shopping signal that informs both co-tenancy and where the next market’s version of those customers lives.
The brands that grow fastest aren’t the ones with the most data. They’re the ones who turn it into the next decision first.
Build It, Buy It, or Partner
Brands generally have three options: build an in-house research function, commission project work from retail market research firms, or partner with a provider that combines research with execution. Each has a place. The criteria that matter most: does the approach use data specific to your brand and customers rather than generic industry reports; does it connect insight to action rather than stopping at a deck; and does it scale as you add markets? For multi-market growth, the strongest setups treat market research and site selection as one workflow — the research that ranks markets is the same research that chooses the sites within them.
Retail Sales Forecasting
Accurate forecasting is where research pays for itself. The most reliable method for new markets and stores is analog modeling: identify existing locations that most resemble a candidate market or site, then project performance from how those analogs actually perform. Forecasts built on a brand’s own data beat industry averages, because different concepts are driven by different variables and a generic benchmark can’t capture that. A credible forecast — not a hopeful one — is what should approve or kill a market in planning, before capital is committed.
The model below shows the front half of that work: weighting what matters to your growth, and watching candidate markets re-rank. It’s a simplified view of the market roadmap Locate builds across every U.S. market, ranked by how many units each can support and what they’re projected to earn.
Market Opportunity, simplified
Weight what drives your growth — markets re-rank live
Where Retail Research Is Heading
Three currents define the rest of 2026 and beyond. Research is getting faster — AI compresses what used to take weeks into near-real-time. It’s getting more spatial — location and foot-traffic data are now core inputs, not add-ons. And it’s getting more integrated — the strongest brands no longer separate “research” from “site selection” from “forecasting,” because they’re stages of one decision. The brands that internalize that, and apply it consistently across every market they enter, are the ones that keep growing while others stall.
Market research isn’t a one-time cost — it’s a framework that compounds. Each market entered with the same disciplined method makes the next one faster and safer to evaluate. Across a portfolio of locations, that discipline is the difference between a growth curve that holds and one that wobbles.
Common Questions
- What is retail market research?
- The systematic gathering and analysis of data about customers, competitors, and markets to guide retail decisions — from pricing and assortment to which markets to enter and where to open. It blends consumer surveys, shopper and foot-traffic data, demographic and psychographic analysis, and sales forecasting.
- How does market research drive growth?
- It de-risks the biggest growth decisions — which markets can support more units, which trade areas match your best customers, how to price locally, and what a new location is likely to earn — turning expansion into a repeatable, evidence-based process.
- What does it include in 2026?
- Increasingly, traditional consumer research combined with location intelligence: demographic and psychographic profiling, mobile foot-traffic data, competitive and co-tenancy analysis, AI-driven demand modeling, and analog-based sales forecasting calibrated to a brand’s own performance.
- How do you forecast sales for a new market or store?
- With analog modeling — finding existing locations that most resemble a candidate, then projecting from how those analogs actually perform. Forecasts built on a brand’s own data beat industry averages.