Peak season 2026: how to use retail media to build shopper trust

A retail media strategy built only around immediate conversion is going to have a hard peak season. According to our latest Golden Quarter report, 71% of UK consumers are cutting back on non-essentials and 63% are putting off bigger purchases, which means the shopper you reach in October is often not ready to buy until January.

What retail media does well in that gap is build shopper trust. 56% of UK consumers say they feel more confident in a brand promoted by a retailer they already shop with, and the effect is strongest among the youngest shoppers, not the oldest.

Here is what that means for a retail media strategy across the peak season, which runs from the early October deals events through to the January sales.

Why do UK shoppers trust brands they find through retailers?

Buying something unfamiliar carries a risk that has little to do with price. 36% of UK consumers worry about wasting money on a product they have not tried, and in a year when 71% are already trimming non-essentials, that worry stops more purchases than the price does.

A retailer the shopper already uses removes some of that risk, because it has chosen to stock the product, it will handle the return, and its reputation is attached to the transaction. The shopper no longer has to work out whether the brand is trustworthy, because someone they already trust has vouched for it.

You might expect older shoppers, with longer relationships with established retailers, to lean on that endorsement most, but UK data shows the reverse: 71% of Gen Z say that seeing a brand consistently as they browse makes them more confident about buying, against 48% of UK consumers overall.

The likeliest explanation is exposure, because younger shoppers have spent their whole buying lives online, where quality and provenance are harder to verify and an unfamiliar brand could be anything. Scepticism is the sensible response to that, and it makes a curated retailer environment more valuable to them. A curated retailer environment does the vouching that a standalone ad cannot.

Most of that shopping still happens somewhere a retailer controls. Online accounted for 28.3% of UK retail sales in July 2026, which leaves nearly 72% happening in shops (ONS). Our own research found UK consumers discovering brands through search, browsing in store, retailer websites and recommendations from friends and family, all of which rank ahead of social media.

How to build a retail media strategy around consideration

Treating retail media as a trust and consideration channel changes how you buy it and how you judge it, in six practical ways.

1. Measure new-to-brand rate alongside sales. If the value of a retailer environment is that it de-risks trying something unfamiliar, then the share of buyers who have never bought from you before is the number that tells you whether it worked.
2. Buy for consistency across the whole window instead of concentrating spend in bursts. Consistent visibility is what 71% of Gen Z say builds their confidence, and being seen three times across October and November reassures a shopper in a way that three times in one week does not.
3. Extend beyond the retailer's own site. Onsite placements reach people already shopping there, while offsite retail media advertising carries that audience data onto the open web and reaches the same shoppers earlier, while they are still deciding.
4. Put your newest and least familiar products in retailer environments first. The trust transfer is most valuable where the shopper has least prior knowledge, so a range extension or a new line gets more from it than your best known product does.
5. Spread budget across the moments where reach is cheaper. Our research puts the conversion ratio on Black Friday at 50%, Boxing Day at 37% and the January sales at 34%, and the difference in what it costs to reach those audiences is much wider than the difference in how well they convert.
6. Use the retailer's first-party data properly. 52% of UK marketers name retailer first-party data as the capability that excites them most, and it is the part of retail media that a standalone display buy cannot replicate.

How to justify retail media spend to your leadership team

Two arguments tend to land in a budget conversation.

• The first is that the channel mix is out of step with how UK shoppers actually find things. Our research found marketers leaning heaviest on social media at 71%, with search and retail media both at 38%, while consumers reported discovering brands through search, in-store browsing, retailer websites and word of mouth ahead of social. Retail media investment is growing quickly in the UK; AA/WARC put retail media growth at 17.9% in Q1 2026, which suggests the market is already correcting, and moving early costs less than catching up late.
• The second is that trust built now is what converts later. Across peak, shoppers are buying for other people, to a deadline and against a list. In January they go back to buying for themselves, and to the behaviour your loyalty programme records already describe. A brand that spent October and November being visible in environments the shopper trusts is a brand they already recognise when they return in their own right.

Making either argument stick means proving the upper funnel did something. If a retail media campaign is measured on consideration, you have to show that the shopper who saw you on a retailer site in October came back in December and bought in January, which is a measurement challenge as much as a media one. With third-party cookies unreliable and GDPR setting the terms for how customer data is used, the join has to come from data you already own. Epsilon resolves identity on deterministic signals such as name and address, so one person with four email addresses is recognised as one customer and not four, and the journey from a retailer environment through to a purchase stays visible.

That consistency across trusted environments is what pays off when it is measured properly. When Currys built its retail media offering with Epsilon, shoppers reached across several channels converted 46% better than those reached through display alone, and the activity drove 56,000 store visits and a 20% increase in in-store sales.

Get the full Golden Quarter research

Advertising Under Pressure is based on two studies Epsilon commissioned Censuswide to run in June 2026. The first surveyed 2,000 UK adults, weighted to be nationally representative. The second surveyed 200 UK marketing decision makers, all of them controlling £500,000 or more in annual marketing budget at brands turning over £5m or more.

Alongside the trust findings above, the report covers where UK consumers are discovering brands and how far that sits from where marketers are spending, which moments across the peak retail calendar convert best and which are cheapest to reach, how openness to switching brands differs by category, and a five point action plan for the £17.9bn UK consumers expect to spend across the peak window.

Download the Golden Quarter report