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Anwar Jappie has over 18 years of experience understanding how brands become a success with consumers. As the head of industry for retail and FMCG for Google sub-Saharan Africa, Anwar is focused on how brands and retailers can combine performance, branding, and creativity to achieve growth and ROI.
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The South African retail landscape is experiencing a profound behavioural shift. Driven by intense macroeconomic pressures, consumers in the country are actively rewriting the rules of the omnichannel shopping journey.
Globally, AI usage has hit 70%, driven not by casual first-time experimenters, but by competent, habitual users.1 Additionally, people increasingly favour AI, at 61%, for personal purposes over work.2 This behaviour is directly shaping how they shop too, while retailers and broader Search advertisers with low AI maturity risk virtual invisibility from today’s shoppers.
To meet growing AI usage among consumers, South African brands and retailers need to reinvent themselves as AI-competent and confident. Using AI-powered strategies and new consumer trends from Google and Ipsos, here is how brands and retailers can improve AI maturity, meet evolving shopping behaviours, and increase sales.
1. Meet generation gaps: Utility vs. inspiration
How people use AI for shopping depends heavily on their age. In the shopping journey, Millennials lead on using AI for automated shopping such as monthly grocery or pet food refills, and for data-rich answers for longer queries.3 Meanwhile, Gen Z uses it for inspiration and discovery for events or special occasions.4
Furthermore, 22% of shoppers use AI to make better choices when hit with decision fatigue,5 and 21% use it for personalised recommendations such as meal inspiration for vegans; a trend driven significantly by both Millennials and Gen Zers over older demographics.6
Solutions: AI Max and creative variety
Because younger generations are embedding AI into everyday tasks, static, one-size-fits-all campaigns can’t meet this changing behaviour.
- Meeting double intent: Supercharging your Search campaign with AI Max will automatically match the right creative asset to the Gen Z searcher, while delivering price-and-utility messaging to the Millennial planner, satisfying both types of intents simultaneously.
- Creative asset variety: Create a bank of high-quality creatives with Asset Studio. This will support your AI Max campaigns in capturing both types of shoppers. Lifestyle images, user-generated content, and short-form videos will help convert Gen Z searchers while reviews, pricing data, product specifications and FAQs will give research-based queries data-rich answers for Millennials.
2. Navigate the cost-of-living squeeze: The cost-conscious budgeter
South Africans are facing severe inflation and cost-of-living constraints, making the country the fourth most price-first country globally, tied with the U.S.7
A staggering 87% of consumers are strongly prioritising budgeting and financial savings,8 which is reflected in their online activity. Driven by drastic increases in petrol prices, search interest for “south africa fuel price forecast” spiked an astronomical 28X in late May 2026, while searches within the topic of petrol increased by 60%.
To mitigate these transport and living costs, consumers are actively looking for ways to tighten their spending, such as cooking at home instead of eating out.9
Solutions: Demand Gen and intent matching
Archaic marketing strategies wait for a user to type a product name into Search. Forward-thinking Search advertisers will strategically seek out intent and create demand as price-conscious shoppers are in the middle of their research.
- Ad messaging: Instead of generic product ads, deploy upper-funnel Demand Gen campaigns built around local budgeting thresholds. For example: “Meals Under R50" or “The Ultimate Grocery List for a Strict R2,500 Monthly Budget” supported by a shoppable catalogue, so that customers can buy the entire list immediately.
- Keyword targeting and smart bidding: Using broad match and smart bidding, generalised, informational keywords about personal budgeting and cost-saving hacks will inform the algorithm. This will find users whose digital footprints signal that they are planning their household budgets right now.
Twenty-two percent of shoppers use AI to make better choices when hit with decision fatigue, and 21% use it for personalised recommendations.
3. Retain the fickle consumer: When brand loyalty is swapped for a discount
An astonishing 54% of consumers across four verticals (grocery, consumer electronics, clothing and home) made a purchase at a brand-new store they had never shopped at before within the last month,10 with price cited as the top driver for brand-switching.11
Concerningly, traditional loyalty programmes are failing to act as a defensive moat. Having a loyalty subscription is ranked second-to-last as a reason for choosing a specific retailer.12 And on average, only 50% of consumers actually use their loyalty programme every time they shop.13
Solutions: First-party data and proof of trust
To stop consumers from defecting to competitors based on price alone, retailers must use AI to make the shopping journey entirely frictionless while elevating trust signals.
- Predictive refills with consented first-party data: Feed hashed, customer data from your loyalty programme into your performance campaigns via customer match. If your data shows a customer buys a specific brand of baby formula or coffee every 30 days, your campaigns should automatically serve them tailored reminders or automated click-to-refill ads at day 25 across search, social, and email.
- Review integration: Nearly half of consumers (49%) agree that reviews strongly influence their final purchase decision.14 Retailers can use dynamic creative optimisation to pull five-star customer reviews from their website and inject them directly into their ad creatives.
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