Changes in consumer behavior, technology and privacy regulation are all impacting retailers’ ability to understand their customers.
The recent growth of social and agentic AI shopping is radically transforming how customer data is captured, often reducing the depth and consistency of insights retailers once relied on. Even when certain information — such as a shipping address — is available, these fractured interactions still limit retailers’ abilities to build a robust, continuous view of the customer journey. This shift has created a kind of data drought — and as any farmer will tell you, drought years are dangerous.
But there’s also opportunity in disruption. Today’s investments will determine tomorrow’s winners. The organizations that embrace these new technologies and commit to forward-looking data strategies will be the ones equipped to succeed, even as the sands continue to shift.
Loyal No More
For years, retailers have relied on loyalty programs to understand their customers and keep them engaged. But today, shifts in shopper behavior and a deteriorating view of all customers’ activities are undercutting those loyalty-centric strategies.
This creates more than just uncertainty — it fosters a crisis of confidence in decision-making. How can you influence a customer’s journey if you can’t see most of it? How do you communicate through the right channels if you don’t know where your audience is spending their time? How do you know if your investments are even paying off? And if you can’t connect browsing data to a final purchase, you also lose the opportunity to capture revenue from sponsored products, a vital income stream for many retail media networks.
One thing is clear: Standing still during periods of change is hardly a recipe for success. Loyalty programs and the strategies they power will have to evolve. And that starts with better tools.
Known Unknowns
If loyalty data and authenticated paths are drying up, marketers need new, durable sources of truth to reconnect the dots of customer behavior.
So how do you bridge the gap between known and unknown shoppers before it becomes a chasm? It comes down to three steps.
- Sharpen your view with enhanced first-party data.
Unknown shoppers don’t disappear just because your visibility does. Their paths still exist — they’re simply harder to detect. By linking your first‑party assets (transactions, site/app events, CRM records, service logs) to a durable identity framework that can responsibly connect customer activity across environments, you can surface missing attributes and restore visibility into who your customers are and how they behave.But that’s just the start. With that enhanced view in hand, you can segment customers more effectively and reach them with more meaningful messaging. And this approach works: Retailers that align first-party data with unified data and measurement frameworks are seeing meaningful improvements in paid media performance and transaction growth after building unified strategies around their own enhanced data. The stronger your data foundation, the better your outcomes.
- Start at the end (to end).
As more of the customer journey slips outside authenticated environments, the only way to maintain continuity is by grounding your measurement in durable identity.Achieving true end-to-end measurement requires stitching impressions (both on and off-property), clicks, site behaviors and transactions into a single, privacy‑conscious thread — even when individual sessions can’t be tied to a login.
With this foundation, retailers not only gain a full view of what drives performance, they can also give their merchants clear, trustworthy proof of ROI — showing which campaigns are making a difference both in-store and across digital touch points.
In doing so, retailers make better decisions across the full funnel and help their merchants invest with confidence.
- See the whole picture with unified measurement.
Speaking of measurement, no single methodology tells the whole story, especially when shopper journeys — known and unknown — zig‑zag across devices and channels.To understand what drives growth, you need a unified approach that blends the strengths of MMM, MTA and incrementality testing together into a single source of truth. MMM gives you long‑term, macro‑level impact; MTA helps you refine at the tactical level; and incrementality validates what’s actually moving the needle.
Together, they create a real view of performance, revealing the patterns needed to optimize your investments. With this foundation, you move toward closed‑loop attribution — a measurement system that reflects reality, not just the parts you can easily see.
Into the Unknown
The rise of the unknown customer is disruptive with a capital “D,” but that doesn’t mean it’s insurmountable. By embracing enhanced data strategies, stronger identity and measurement foundations, you can turn uncertainty into insight and flourish — even in the harshest market conditions.
Nick Mangiapane leads TransUnion Market Strategy and Development for Retail Media Networks and Commerce Signals. A former CMO, he sees opportunities and challenges through the eyes of TU’s marketing clients. He has a broad range of marketing leadership, adtech, martech and data analytics experience in both B2C and B2B companies including Procter & Gamble, Newell Rubbermaid, Trane and Hoover. Mangiapane joined Commerce Signals when it was a 15-person startup and helped lead it through two acquisitions. He earned his MBA from Cornell University and his bachelor’s from Boston College.
