Identify and Understand CPG, Durables and Fast-Moving Goods Shoppers

Shopper Identity

Identity is complex. Each channel through which your customers engage your brand – whether that’s a Facebook ad, a reengagement ad, your DTC website, a retailer visit, digital purchase, social media post or email – holds just a fragment of insights into who that person is, their purchase history with your brand, their preferences and their interests. Most B2C businesses have 4 to 7 internal systems containing data which is managed by 3 to 5 internal IDs.

Without an identity solution to align those fragmented and rapidly growing data points, and to recognise who an individual is and the history with your brand, you’ll likely deliver a disjointed, inconsistent customer experience.

Acxiom has been at the forefront of identity innovation since the launch of AbiliTec in 1999, the first referential identity graph allowing for persistent IDs, to the recent launch of Acxiom Real ID™,  which enables identity transparency and brand ownership of identity graphs. Acxiom Real ID™ enables you to recognise 5x more shoppers and connect together all of their experiences with you.  

Build a Shopper Identity Graph

Cookie-dominant identity graphs, on-boarders and platforms are in decline. PII and first-party data mastery, integrations, identity and data sharing are the new currency to future-proof your business and seamlessly create unique value exchanges with shoppers. Acxiom has a clear roadmap to transition manufacturers with Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) ambitions through these changes:

1. Assemble all people-related data into your privately-owned Identity Graph:
   • rGRAPH collects personally identifiable information as a normal part of establishing a relationship with a customer.
   • rGRAPH360 stores and supports pseudonymous data, allowing brands to ethically connect it with deterministic data in the graph.
2. Leverage this first-party framework to activate, personalise and measure with rID as your brand-specific universal identifier enabling a true 360° single customer view.

The Shopper Identity Graph offers the following key benefits:

Control

Simply put: You own it. You scale it, and you have more leverage into publisher networks and/or second-party retailer partnerships.

Future Proof

Eliminate reliance on third-party cookies and instead use a first-party tag: rTAG is a first-party tag for deployment across owned and paid media and functions as a pure first-party tag delivering diner signals data back to your ecosystem.

Multi-Functional

Identity isn’t just about marketing. Your identity graph also ensures your operational use cases, like retail store-specific SKU delivery, inventory, product and variant development are kept up-to-date with shopper engagements, transactions and touchpoints in real time.

Create First-Party Data at Scale

Historically, manufacturers have been at a disadvantage due to a lack of extensive first-party data (which has been barely more than basic registration, warranty cards or technical support interactions that are only available for some categories), forcing brands to pursue retailer cooperation based on their closely guarded loyalty card data. However, more recent shopper recognition methods have helped fill in knowledge gaps.

Today, anonymous website visitors can be assigned a unique ID to which household-level characteristics are appended, turning devices or IP addresses into a rich shopper portrait (belonging to a Personicx segment, etc.) .

Since the pandemic, QR codes have become increasingly popular. Dynamic QR codes, combined with your first-party HTML rTag, can capture behaviours, deliver digital coupons, access to services or product information and land this data within your Customer Data Platform (CDP). 

QR codes tend to have high scan-to-app install rates, which further boosts first-party data collection. They can also be used on delivery packaging, mailers and in-store displays with exclusive coupons. Other innovative applications of QR codes include scan-to-call for customer service.  

Digital and social media generations like Millennials and Gen Z may provide a boost to brand efforts to build direct customer relationships because they are more open to sharing personal information. They are not only motivated by earning discounts and getting exclusive deals through their loyalty memberships but they are comparatively more into personalised convenience (delivery benefits), services (recommendations, product-related content) and gamification.

Though brick-and-mortar retailers may be better off as far as knowing their customers compared to manufacturers, retailers still struggle to capture insights on all their shoppers. For example, just 51% of grocery store customers are currently sharing any personal information (PII).

Manufacturers who own or run a proprietary retail network (from just a few flagship stores to a more substantial retail presence) would benefit from modernising rich data capture from store point-of-sale (POS) systems and other sources. To maximise throughput at the checkout counter, most POS systems were originally optimised to enable rapid order capture and payment. Newer payment systems, however, are cloud-based that have native capabilities and/or APIs to connect with loyalty, inventory, accounting, and other systems.  Store systems typically enable customer identity capture, purchase history and product preferences from their integrated POS. Acxiom can significantly boost customer recognition and append rich persona data to POS card swipes.

Hence, it is critical to leverage a broad set of customer data collection applications that take into consideration the changing privacy regulations and the phasing out of identifiers like third-party cookies. Acxiom solutions provide brands with the ability to:

• Collect comprehensive insights across shopper touchpoints including anonymous and authenticated DTC site visitors, QR codes scanned at retailers or other locations
• Transform payment processing at flagship store or owned retail locations into rich first-party data
• Maximise ingestion of paid and owned media user behaviours

Simply put, we enable brands to know more and to convert that knowledge into high value interactions at scale.

Enhance Shopper Insights with Data

What you know about your customers can be further enhanced with zero-party (customer volunteered), second-party (shared by business partners like retailers) and third-party (licenced demographics, affinities and behaviours) data.  This new rich foundational asset fuels your brand's Customer Data Platform (CDP), enabling highly engaging and personalised interactions on your DTC site and app, paid media to in-person shopping trips, click-and-collect or delivery partners.

Third-party Data Enrichment

Licenced third-party data can be leveraged for audience insights and discovery by sizing and segmenting the addressable market and building 360° customer archetypes. Manufacturers that have sufficient and clean first-party data can append these third-party data elements and propensities to fill in gaps in their customer portrait for use in analytic, personalisation and engagement applications.

Audience models are important because they provide information actual data does not, like:

Learn more about best practises around testing, custom model creation and more to build optimal audiences.

InfoBase

Acxiom InfoBase® is comprised of several services:

• The premier source of marketable and accurate shopper lists with coverage of more than 260 million U.S. individuals and approximately 186 million households for digital and offline customer acquisition.
• A comprehensive single source of third-party descriptive and touch point data for nearly all addressable U.S. shoppers with more than 5,000 attributes and propensities allowing you to better understand customers, better predict brand affinity, preferences, and behaviour as well as engage and personalise their experiences across digital and offline channels.
• Personicx® provides marketers with high-performance, multi-dimensional shopper and user segmentation solutions that deliver robust insights in ready-to-go personas for quickly defining audiences and creating exceptional customer experiences. For example, Personicx Lifestage is a household-level segmentation system. Using demographic and behavioural data, it assigns every U.S. household to one of 70 clusters within 21 lifestage groups. All segments are updated monthly to maintain accuracy.

CPG, Durable and Fast-Moving Goods Shopper Audiences

Acxiom can further enrich insights by integrating category, brand and competitive buyers, retail chain in-store and online shoppers that are curated in partnership with select data providers who meet requirements for ethical data use – covering your brand and your competitors.

With past purchase behaviour remaining the best predictor of future buying behaviour, Acxiom partner audiences deliver highly predictive data for acquisition and prospecting (in addition to CPG, electronics, appliance and fashion and many other shopping propensities available in InfoBase®):

Second-party Clean Rooms

The largest brands in the world are driving market transformation by working with suppliers and partners to combine insights with marketing tactics to grow sales efficiently. The 2024 deprecation of third-party cookies and more stringent privacy regulations have given this more urgency. Advances in data sharing tech and a migration from on-premise to the cloud have made this more cost-effective and less cumbersome.

Acxiom’s Clean Room, powered by Snowflake, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or other partners enables second-party data sharing and monetisation by joining your shopper data with select partner(s) data via a neutral collaborative data ecosystem. Our standard clean room processes more than 3 billion records. Collaboration can be as simple as overlap analysis or enabling co-marketing campaigns, or it can be complex like partner data hubs or exchanges.

Our privacy-by-design approach helps safely share and monetise data in our complete clean room solutions – environment and services – for better marketing results. We never release your customers’ personally identifiable information to partners. We only allow partners to see the data that is agreed between them.

• Enable co-marketing initiatives and cross-sell opportunities
• Increase ROI, insights and leads
• Efficiently ingest and manage all types of disparate data into a single environment for business activation
• Leverage Acxiom’s unparallelled data governance and superior identity spines, which are essential for collaboration

Zero-party Data Insights

Data volunteered by shoppers through surveys and other applications can deliver high-level strategic insights but often don't scale well due to sample size limitations.

Brands collaborating with Acxiom can significantly enhance the utility of this zero-party data by matching survey respondents to the 260 million individuals in InfoBase to:

• Append Infobase and Acxiom partner data elements for richer insights
• Leverage the survey as a seed for lookalike modelling and scaling up audiences
• Score the enriched first-party graph with these new classifications
• Activate these new high value audiences across digital and offline channels

For Acxiom’s point-of-view on how relevant and quality data can create a connected customer experience, see here.

Customised Audiences

Acxiom’s automated logistic regression modelling service is available for building custom models based on retailer first-party data.

Data Guru, our team of data strategists, looks at your campaign objectives and provides the expertise to guide you through audience creation, curating the best possible audience to crush your advertising goals.

With Data Guru, you can create custom audiences, extend look-alike audiences and distribute to your preferred publishers and platforms – as easy as one, two, three, determined by your: