Industry Voices: Have Retailers Acquired Enough First-Party Data?

Article by Rimma Kats | Oct 3, 2019

Retailers, like most marketers, crave first-party data. It not only helps them better understand their customer base, but affords them a more direct relationship with consumers.

We recently sat down with retailers, including Natori, Article and Knix, to discuss their current marketing efforts and how they define digital transformation. Previously, we dug into the marketing channels they rely on most and challenges they face with measurement. In today’s “Industry Voices: A Focus on Retail” video, we look at the first-party data they’ve collected—and whether they need more.

“Data is everything,” said Joel Warady, general manager of chief sales and marketing officer at Enjoy Life Foods, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mondelez. “[There’s] this idea of thinking digitally but acting analog, so one of the ways that we apply our data is by going to consumer-facing events and having different opportunities for consumers to provide us with data on a one-to-one basis, face-to-face. ... We take that data and build our CRM, and we're constantly going to our current database within our CRM and asking for more data. So, we are on a constant pursuit.”

Danielle Brown, CMO at Knix, agreed that you can never have too much data. But before marketers set out on a path to acquire as much first-party data as possible, they must first think about how they’re eventually going to use it.

“Sure, I want more, but what am I going to do with it?” Brown said. “It's really important to build a purpose-driven data story, because the things that you can do with that first-party data are things that lead you to be able to scale. ... The more I know about my customer, the more I can go out and find other great customers like her. And so do I have enough? No. I'd really like more. It is the data that I have organized well enough? It is. It's getting better, but I think we're in this position ... where we could probably do better with the data that we have before we go organize more.”