Recognised as a Top Retail Expert, 2026
Keynote Speaker
Nick Gray - IGU Global
25+ years inside Adidas, Nike, Sneakerboy, Westfield and global retail leadership.
Nick Gray is a recognised voice on the future of retail, emotional intelligence, and human-led leadership.
He is regularly invited to speak to senior leaders, founders, and teams navigating change in an AI-accelerated world.
What's left to compete on is whether your customer trusts you enough to stop comparing.
THE FUTURE OF RETAIL
Retail spent the last decade getting faster, cheaper and more convenient, and most of it worked, but speed is easy to copy and convenience is now the minimum anyone expects. What’s left to compete on is whether your customer trusts you enough to stop comparing, and that gets built the same way every time, by repeating the same feeling until it becomes your reputation.
This session looks at where retail goes when every competitor can match your price and your delivery window, why the brands that win become the emotional default their customer no longer has to think about, and what it actually takes to get there.
Best for:
Retail leadership teams, brand founders, strategy conferences, executive offsites
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF RETAIL
Every business I walk into has more data than it’s ever had, conversion and sell-through on every screen, and still can’t tell me why a customer chose them over the store next door. The numbers show you what happened, but trust gets built in the moments the dashboard can’t see, the hesitation before the purchase and the reassurance someone needed and didn’t get.
This session puts the two back together, reading your numbers for the emotion behind them and designing the experience that removes hesitation instead of pushing harder through the funnel. Leaders leave with R.I.C.E., the four motivations people actually make decisions with.
Best for:
Retailers, designers, CX leaders, innovation teams, industry events
HOW TO CONNECT TO YOUR CONSUMER
IN A WORLD THAT'S GONE CRAZY
When people are stretched and uncertain they keep buying but they stop taking risks, and the first thing they drop is the brand they’re not sure about. Pressure pushes every decision further into feeling, and trust becomes the shortcut that lets someone decide without doing all the work again, and in a market this noisy that shortcut is worth more than any campaign.
This session looks at how stress and identity are changing the way your customer decides right now, where that hesitation is already showing up in your own numbers, and how to give people the reassurance they need to choose you without leaning on a negative feeling to get the sale.
Best for:
Marketing teams, brand leaders, executive audiences, change-focused organisations
THE NEW ROLE OF BRICK AND MORTAR
Physical retail is where trust gets proved, the one place your customer checks whether the brand they met on a screen is the one that actually turns up. Every conversation your team has, the space, even the silence, either confirms that feeling or quietly breaks it.
This session reframes the store as the place your reputation gets built one visit at a time, and gives leaders a way to see what their stores are teaching customers to expect from them.
Best for:
Retail executives, store designers, property teams, omnichannel brands
The Emotion Economy. How to Build Trust That Actually Converts.
Most brands entering a new market arrive with a distribution plan, a pricing position and a marketing budget, and all three can be right while the thing still doesn’t move the way the forecast said it would. We make decisions with emotion and justify them with logic afterwards, and a brand nobody has heard of yet is starting every customer at hesitation. This session covers what people are actually buying when they buy from you, how trust gets built commercially rather than communicated, and where brands lose customers they have already paid to win.
Recent and upcoming Events
International Trade Week 2026: Online, 10 November 2026
Nick Gray will be speaking at International Trade Week, presented by the UK Government with Santander and the Business Growth Service, on The Emotion Economy: how to build trust that actually converts in Australia and New Zealand.
Jewellery Industry Summit: Customs House, 9 October 2026
Nick Gray spoke at the Jewellery Industry Summit on What She’s Really Buying: The New Psychology of the Jewellery Consumer.
Nick Gray spoke at the iMedia Retail Summit Australia,
April 22–24 2026, Gold Coast.
Nick Gray spoke at the iMedia Future of Marketing Summit NZ — Christchurch, 31 July 2026
Nick Gray spoke at the Melbourne Retail Show, September 2026, Melbourne.