This highlights article summarises IGD’s full retail media report, exploring why growth is not always delivering value and how the CLOVER framework helps brands and retailers create more effective, shopper-focused campaigns.

Retail media and shopper marketing activations are central to the work we do at IGD an often form a key part of our store visit, market visit and in-store reports. We document a huge number of activations and our sense is that they account for a growing share of total marketing spend for brands and a growing share of operating income for retailers.

As this bandwagon continues to accelerate, a nagging question has become more and more pertinent: Are we creating more value?

The answer is probably no: as a lot of retail media becomes an overlay on good old-fashioned promotions it faces similar challenges of cannibalisation, renting market share, overloading shoppers and failing to deliver any actual incrementality.

The reasons for the mismatch are twofold: retailers are neglecting the shopper in the quest for additional revenue and profitability. Our fears that retail media could be tipping into a sales tax rather than a shopper-centric attempt to influence behaviour are coming true. From the brand side, motivations are becoming muddled as well. ‘Just because you can doesn’t mean you should’ has never rung truer.

In all of this, two of the four key stakeholders in grocery retailing are often forgotten: retailers and brands are busy chasing assorted metrics and KPIs while the poor old shoppers and in-store colleagues are often an afterthought.

We need a reset: retail media needs to be a triple win that benefits shoppers, brands and retailers.  

With that in mind, we have set out the CLOVER model, a simple framework that should help retail media participants sense check activations or campaigns before they even start. The fulcrum of the framework is this: Every single retail media activation should be preceded by an analysis of how it positively impacts the brand, the retailer and the shopper. If it isn’t likely to achieve this triple win: either don’t do it or start again.

The key considerations that retailers and brands should evaluate are:

• Channel

• Love

• Objectives

• Value

• Effectiveness

• Relevance

By objectively assessing these components of retail media, campaigns will stand a greater chance of success and maybe avoid some of the unfortunate pitfalls that we see in-store around the world.