Retail Media - A Retail Marketing Next Iteration

Part One.

Challenges facing Merchants (any retail verticals selling goods or services) and Sellers (manufacturers or intermediaries selling on behalf of them) to profitability have intensified, from consumer post-pandemic perception of convenience, value, and loyalty to the current cost-of-living crisis, from consumer sentiments, uncertainty, to digital-influenced behavior shifts, all the way to media and platform fragmentations.

Consumer and shopper (C&S) centricity is today’s key breakthrough in the evolution of retail marketing:

1. Leading Merchants and Sellers recognize the critical differences between Consumers and Shoppers.
2. They understand that the above differences provide new and broad avenues for innovation.
3. Current and new permissioned data sources, from POS, loyalty, digital properties, and mutually beneficial partners, allow Merchants and Sellers to understand these differences.
4. They understand that insights or leveraged data create new opportunities for value creation and competitive advantage.
5. They understand that assumptions about Key Factors of Consumer, Shopper, and Business Success can/will change; hence, they need a quicker feedback loop to understand, engage, calibrate, and optimize key drivers back to their most important priorities (short and long-term).

Talk to any retailer(merchant in any vertical selling goods or services) and seller, and they will most likely say they are Consumer or Shopper centric(“they focus on influencing their behavior to improve business results”); this is at the heart of their process, in reality:

Merchant retailers first consider their (e)store, categories, or demand(marketplaces).

Sellers (CPG, FMCG) think about their brand first.

Traditional retailers asking sellers to do marketing through their ecosystems has always been contentious and sometimes thought of as a “cost of doing business” vs. their dominant communication vehicle (mass reach, mass communication); provocatively, it goes something like this:

?“Retailer: what “we” ask - ?what it opens up in our retail-supplier relationship, “the asker” will take care of the activation & measurement, this is how much is going to cost you (SG&A),...”.

Innovative Merchants and Sellers see significant opportunities for new ways to bring these two complementary perspectives together in a holistic C&S approach and how transformative it can be in shaping retail marketing approaches, improving business performance, and principally shaping a new type of collaboration.

What does all of this have to do with Retail Media?

The truth is, the underlying “rise of retail media” does not represent a revolution in Retail Marketing but rather an iteration on this holistic or sometimes called integrated Consumer and shopper Journey dictated by seismic changes in C&S behavior, the digital-first area and its post-cookie impact on communication, what the retail landscape and competitiveness, new service categories, new regulations, and technological innovations.

In the following post, I would like to talk about how we got here, where retail media sit, why, and the so what.

Thank you for your time and comments, John.