Embracing marketing creativity through collaboration: Partnerships for retail and data

Companies struggle to know their customers. This is the harsh reality for all marketers. Achieving a full view of their customers’ data is almost impossible especially when analysed in isolation. So how can brand-side marketers collaborate with retailers to bring creativity to the table and make the most of multiple sets of data? The current challenge for brands that interact with a customer across numerous platforms is the build-up of multiple identifiers for each single real-life human being. According to Gartner, more than 90% of marketers struggle to seamlessly connect more than three channels on the buyer journey. However, brands should not be suffering in silence, and marketers must double down on their commitment to be responsible practitioners. Help is at hand in the form of retailers, who often know more about customers than the brands themselves. These collaborations are known throughout the marketing industry as second-party data partnerships. Second-party data is simply another organisation’s first-party data, shared between brands and retailers to enable better data-driven marketing. The technique is becoming increasingly popular and by next year, the use of second party data is expected to grow by 26 percent to be used by 64 percent of all advertisers. So how do brands and retailers make the most of the data gold mine they’ll be sitting on? It’s all well and good having this customer intel but knowing how and when to act upon it is key. Like with any campaign, trial and error will be paramount to understanding what works and what doesn’t to give marketers peace of mind when it comes to embracing creativity.