This post was created in partnership with Sam’s Club
Retail media that looks beyond ROAS and leverages customer insights can unlock long-term value and customer loyalty.
During an ADWEEK House Cannes Lions panel co-hosted with Sam’s Club, Ryan Joe, editor-in-chief of ADWEEK, sat down with industry leaders to discuss how data and predictive modeling are helping brands build relationships that endure long after checkout.
How a membership model can transform brand-building
Being a warehouse club has data advantages—namely, that customers have to scan a membership ID every time they shop, said Harvey Ma, VP and general manager of Sam’s Club Connect at Sam’s Club. “It’s not just a transaction; it’s the start of a relationship.”
Being able to track behavior over time helps Sam’s Club and its partners like P&G create better customer experiences and capitalize on what retail media does best, which is performance, he added.
Jacques Hagopian, SVP of North America brand operations at P&G, noted that the convergence of communication and commerce is one of the major shifts that the industry is experiencing right now, and it’s creating a golden opportunity for brand marketers.
“We have retailers that are becoming media companies, and media companies that are becoming retailers,” Hagopian said. “Every point of reach is now a point of sale. How exciting is that?”
The Sam’s Club ecosystem, in particular, provides a rich environment for retail media because its members pay to shop in that model, added Hagopian. “That allows us to engage those members with experiences in different aspects of content to take a moment of inspiration and turn it into a moment where they put things in a cart,” he said.
Hagopian then shared a use case of how Sam’s Club’s first-party data is helping P&G tap into consumer behavior to drive long-term business growth. For its Cascade Platinum Plus dishwasher detergent product, P&G wanted to reach the warehouse club members who hadn’t used it before. Specifically, P&G aimed to attract consumers with related interests who might be more likely to love the product, such as cooking enthusiasts. The brand identified 800,000 households to target, and the experiment resulted in a 2X increase in marketing effectiveness.
Hagopian called it “a great example where the consumer behavior, a consumer insight, a product that meets that need, combined with the member data, created a perfect environment for that engagement.”
Ma noted that the warehouse environment is also ideal for unique consumer activations that can convert to sales, such as sampling, live demos, and parking lot events. “Retail media is so much more than just the ads. The ads are just a means to serve and sell products,” he said. “We don’t want to lose that creativity piece, and that human connection is so important.”
