A struggle for consumer brand loyalty due to slowing economic growth across APAC despite continued investment into improving tech to support CX efforts are among Forrester's top predictions for B2C marketing and CX in 2025.

The analyst firm's 2025 B2C Marketing and Customer Experience (CX) predictions reports include individual forecasts for B2C marketing, customer experience, consumer, media and advertising, and marketing agencies.

In the Asia Pacific, Forrester predicts a struggle for consumer brand loyalty due to slowing economic growth, with one in four brands expected to engage in a price war.

Globally, meanwhile, the firm anticipates GenAI displacing 100,000 frontline agents from top global contact centre outsourcers, and that TikTok will remain unbanned or undivested in the US. Forrester also sees four in 10 privacy-concerned consumers yielding personal data for AI convenience.

Other key predictions include AI-integrated search tripling SEO budgets and data, creative, and media scale dominating commerce.

"Given genAI’s potential to transform marketing and customer experience, many brands eagerly experimented with the technology in 2024,” said Sharyn Leaver, chief research officer at Forrester. “But it soon became clear that this transformation is a long game. In 2025, B2C marketing, digital, and CX leaders must build on lessons learned from this experimentation and focus on improving their data infrastructure to gain better customer insights."

Forrester also forecast a 25% decline in brand loyalty in 2025 due to rising prices. However, despite this decline, loyalty programs are expected to gain popularity as consumers seek value and reprieve from indiscriminate price shopping.

"In 2025, expect consumers to be less loyal to brands in general but more committed to brands that assure them value without the hassle of the haggle," Forrester's report authors said.

The firm also predicts a tripling of investment to unify data for loyalty and marketing tech stacks, with 78% of US B2C marketing executives currently admitting that their marketing and loyalty technologies are siloed.

But while AI will dominate, most enterprises fixated on AI ROI will scale back prematurely, Forrester predicts, adding an AI reset is underway. In Forrester’s Q2 AI Pulse Survey, 2024, 49% of US generative AI decision-makers said their organisation expects ROI on AI investments within one to three years and 44% said within three to five years. Impatience with AI ROI could prompt enterprises to prematurely scale back investments, which would be a long-term disadvantage.

"Obvious use cases that enterprises experimented with last year are now table stakes and embedded in business software. Leaders are realising that ROI from investments will take longer than they anticipated and are shifting toward pragmatically delivering ROI over time," the analyst firm stated.

Forrester advised picking differentiating use cases leveraging company-specific data and expertise, and creating a roadmap that balances short-term and longer-term business ROI to create a flywheel for reinvesting early successes into future AI projects.