How Can Retailers and Brands Drive CPG Growth?

Boots, Tesco, Ocado and Sainsbury (Nectar) sharing a stage? That’s not something you see every day.

But at Madfest, the common goal of explaining the opportunity of retail media to brand folk created one of those black swan events.

The panel’s key theme was how the industry (retailers and brands working together) can create incremental growth by implementing brand marketing plans in this media right through the funnel, not just as the last conversion step.

Clearly, retailers want to persuade brand marketers (this audience) that their longer term “upper funnel” objectives can also be addressed with the tools at the disposal of the retailers helped by:

– The insight power of first-party data retailers
– The march of machine learning (and now generative AI), with the holy grail ambition of serving the right message at the right time to the right shopper….

Retailers talk about the need to assess results based on “lifetime value” and classic upper funnel goals like recruiting new buyers, not just short term return on ad spend (ROAS).

They are talking about their (retail media’s) long term success being driven by their clients (brand owners) achieving commensurate results.

Some of the panel highlights included:

–  Staying focused on the true needs of the shopper (e.g. not adding friction). (Sainsbury talked about already having removed some instore installations because of poor customer response)

– Creativity. To deliver more than the usual rather simplistic executions associated most often with bottom of funnel “shopper marketing.”

– CPG firms are wrestling with how to remove the traditional silos between brand and “sales”(e.g. the retailer relationship) and they are experimenting with different structures. It’s got a long way to go, they say.

It was interesting that Tesco and DunnHumby sponsored an entire strand (and venue), making “retail media” one of the five key topic areas at this very brand-oriented festival. I wouldn’t have imagined that a couple of years ago.

The panelists said that despite publicity of spend, the U.S. is now looking to the U.K. for inspiration. Why? The U.K. is more advanced in “in store” media – whereas much of the work in the U.S. is mostly digital.

This is clearly going to ‘run and run’ as a huge marketing (and business) issue.

What are other media owners doing to compete?

More: If you want to understand shopper needs better, you may discover that retailer’s existing sources are, ahem, “light.”

This is where Shopper Intelligence steps up to the plate. We’re focused on the “why” from the direct perspective of the shopper themselves – something 100 CPG firms (and retailers) globally already find pretty darn helpful. Our always-on shopper surveys tell you how shoppers behave rather than simply what they purchased.