Retail Media Summit Keynote: Disrupting the Buyer-Supplier Relationship

Is retail media disrupting the foundation of the buyer-supplier relationship? Upending the trade relationship dynamic?

During his keynote address Thursday at the Retail Media Summit, Colin Lewis said it is, and he set out to show how both brands and retailers can navigate their way into a different world that will benefit both parties, rather than continue the often-adversarial nature of buyer-supplier relationships.

At the Path to Purchase Institute’s event in Chicago, Lewis of RetailMedia.works compared the adversarial relationship to that of boxers Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston in the 1960s, showing a famous photograph of Ali (representing retailers) standing over Liston (representing suppliers) after a knockdown during their championship match.

With regard to retail media and the retailer-supplier relationship, the elephants in the room are trade funds and real data. “The game of elephant in the room can’t continue,” Lewis said. He then compared retail media to a platypus. “What the hell is it?” he asked.

Lewis also made a case for creativity: “We should inject creativity into everything we do.”

He said there’s a “problem with teams,” identifying marketing’s “Fab Four” — brand marketing, trade marketing, shopper marketing and retail media —  and offering these realities:

• “Trade, shopper, retail media and brand marketing work with different objectives, different KPIs, different datasets and are segregated as a result.”
• “All of those teams have different asks of the brand. They don't understand what others have asked. They don’t even understand how things fit together.”
• While trade marketing is “a B2B (business-to-business) game” and about consideration, brand marketing is about B2C (business-to-consumer) and awareness, and shopper marketing is about B2C and conversion. Retail media, meanwhile, is about B2B and B2C as well as consideration.

Another way of saying the same things, according to Lewis: People who buy things for a living and people who sell things for a living have very different skills.

So, what’s a marketer to do?

• “Responsibility for generating brand demand is no longer solely the domain of the supplier brand team; it has become a shared responsibility between the brand and the retailer.”
• “Thinking of those budgets in silos is not optimal to drive the best results. Instead of negotiating individual budgets, look at the total spend across all budgets to drive sales for a retailer.”
• “Expand the remit from selling advertising to being the purveyor of creative ideas that provide solutions to business problems.”

Lewis says the new game is total collaboration to unlock value:

Stop the silos: Get them all in the room.
Align incentives and budget: Come together and drive collaboration.
Brands: Hold retailers to account but align your teams.
Retailers: Think like a media business and solve joint problems.
Both brands and retailers: Get creative.

In conclusion, Lewis said the challenge is to form new models of governance:

• How do you really break down silos?
• How can you shift budget across teams?
• How do you figure out budget allocation?
• What is the decision making process ?
• What is the right cadence of being connected?
• How do you figure out governance?