New research exposes a gap in retailer-brand partnerships — and how to fix it

“Who is your favorite retailer?” 

Given the countless options available at shoppers’ fingertips, the chances of getting a firm answer is anyone’s guess. For starters, 48% of today’s shoppers said they were open to buying from new retailers during the holiday season.¹

But retailers are not the only ones facing this challenge. Now, only one in ten smartphone users are sure of a specific brand they plan to buy when they start to look for information online.² This means every customer is up for grabs, all the time. 

So, how can retailers attract them in all the different ways and places they shop? And how can retailers scale their digital marketing programs across all their brand manufacturer partners?

Building even stronger relationships with their partners is a great place for retailers to start. In the recent past, a healthy retail ecosystem meant brands created demand with offline marketing, like radio, TV, and print. Then, retailers captured that demand with in-store displays, mailers, and more. But we’ve entered a digital-first world, where 58% of Global purchases were prompted by something the shopper saw online³, and that delineation no longer holds true. To seamlessly engage with people through marketing both online and offline, retailers and brands must partner closely on their branding, sales, and upsell strategies in real time.

Research by MIT SMR Connections shows that brands are ready to increase co-op digital marketing investment with their retail partners, because they know it’s where they need to be to meet their customers. However, brand budgets have been limited by a lack of visibility into how digital investment influences retail shoppers. 

Solutions, like Shopping campaigns with partners, that enable retailers to easily partner with brands — driving better returns on retailers’ digital marketing investments, highlighting omnichannel performance metrics, and bringing traditional offline co-op partnerships online at scale — are key to bridging these gaps in retailer-brand partnerships. And with Google Cloud, retailers can bring together this ads data with other first party data from their brands to develop a more complete picture of the customer journey.

Retailers who deliver these better, measurable partnership options will do more than add value to their strategic relationships. They will win incremental funding from brand manufacturers for digital co-op campaigns and gain customized, actionable, data-driven insights to drive stronger web traffic and sales across their sites and their stores.

If you’re a retailer looking to punch up your partnership strategy, download the full MIT SMR Connections report here.

¹Google/Ipsos, Omnichannel Holiday Study, November 2018 – January 2019, US, n=5,543 online Americans 18+ who shopped in the past two days.