Brand/Retailer partnerships

If you want to know your clients, you must understand their behavior. But in terms of customer knowledge, all advertisers are not on an equal footing. Retailers have invented loyalty programs (green stamps) that allow them to collect valuable information every time their customers make a purchase: this is what we call transactional data. The history of all the transactions attributed to one single customer (specifically those occurring in-store) has long been the cornerstone of a successful customer relationship strategy. Advertisers who have access to it can interpret the purchasing habits of their consumers and be more relevant in their interactions with them by offering them the products and promotions they would like.

Loyalty incentives, sponsorship programs, targeted ads… are just some of the many CRM tools brands have had to do without. CRM for retailers, mass media for brands: that seemingly stable equilibrium was about to be turned around by the emergence of what we call behavioral data…

 

The digital revolution has brought about many changes to digital marketing, non the least of which is the emergence of new touchpoints along the customer journey. Transactions had long been the tip of the iceberg of the customer journey: advertisers were unable to detect the intentions preceding it and qualify the experience following it. Now, modern marketers have at their disposal a wide array of tracking tools enabling them to collect data on their customers’ habits, providing they give their consent. Web searches, website visits and targeted ad clicks: these behaviors generate data that enrich customer knowledge and balance the power struggle between brands and retailers.

But most of all, this revolution benefits a new type of player: data experts. The new gatekeepers of customer relationship, through which both brands and retailers have to in order to access to the raw material that is customer data.

It is in the United States that the collaboration between brands and retailers began to center around data. American retailers started selling brands media spaces on their websites and newsletters. They also allowed them to create conditional tags to follow consumers who visit their product pages.

Once again, the game-changing move came from a data rich player: Amazon. Amazon does not only provide brands with on-site advertising space, but also enables them to use the data gathered by Amazon itself in other programmatic environments.