Simon Cetin, Partner at iPROM and Founder and Head of the Retoba Laboratory, has outlined seven key trends for the Slovenian Marketing Association that will decisively shape marketing, brand building, and product development in 2026. His analysis is grounded in shifts in human behaviour and decision-making, changes that have been accelerated in recent years by artificial intelligence.
He emphasises that 2026 will not be a turning point because of new tools, but because of a deeper understanding of how people now make decisions: a move away from traditional information search toward the expectation of immediate, clear answers; the growing importance of explainability as a competitive advantage; and the central role of first-party data as the fuel for the effective use of artificial intelligence.
