In order for retail personalization to succeed long term, retailers must work closely with brands to develop compelling promotions.
 
Retailers and suppliers acknowledge that each has an essential knowledge that the other one does not. Suppliers know about their product market research while retailers know more about sales. FMCG Retailers have the big consumer picture: their transaction history, the view across categories, departments and brands and their ability to identify and track individual customers over time. Suppliers know the products and more. They run consumer panels and market research, have detailed product and category knowledge, complementary product intelligence and a view across store formats. Combining those data sets will generate a unified perspective and result in improved promotion and trade decisions–in other words, it will pull the required number of rabbits out of the hat.  
 
One of the bumps in the road FMCG retailers face when embarking on a personalization programs is generating and maintaining a bank of offers. Attracting customers from diverse segments who have varied purchase habits requires a robust set of deals that cater to many tastes. Collaboration is the best way to gets the suppliers support in the creation of these offers.
 
However, there are several challenges to data collaboration. Retailers may fear for their customers’ privacy and also for the privacy of other vendors that they work with. There is also a conflict of interest – suppliers would like to increase market share and sell to those who buy the competition while retailers don’t want to confuse loyal customers. Last, from retailer perspective collaboration involves a lot of work, managing the communications with all their suppliers.

 
A good model for collaboration is a model that addresses the conflicts between retailers and suppliers while delivering the benefits. On one hand, you have to manage all of the conflicts in a fair and transparent way, and on the other hand, deliver value to each party.
Here are examples for reports that retailers can provide to suppliers. In return, the brand can provide coupons and recommend to which segments to send offers.  

1. Sales drivers: A report that helps brands understand the key purchase drivers and category sales by customer segment.
2. New product launches: Helps brands evaluate and change strategy following a new product launch and trials.
3. Purchase patterns: Understands purchase cadence, brand loyalty and customer baskets through detailed analysis.
4. Promotional strategy: Discovers coupon sensitivity, product affinity and other campaign metrics.

At ciValue, we identified the need for effective and efficient collaboration as one of the major drivers of successful retail personalization programs. Then we invested significant thought and effort into fostering successful collaboration.
 
ciValue’s cloud platform produces such reports, supports all the collaboration issues, protects privacy, addresses conflict of interest and also allows the brand to feed coupons to the system.  
 
At ciValue we enable the retailer for the following possibilities:

• Create a unified monthly report for all suppliers.
• Provide suppliers with a set of specific reports on a monthly basis.  
• Give suppliers access to on-demand reports.  
• Provide suppliers with category-level reports.

Using data and reports, suppliers and FMCG retailers collaborate and create compelling, successful promotions for specific and well-targeted audiences. Sharing data fosters transparency and creates win-win campaigns.
 
By combining efforts with suppliers, FMCG retailers can make sure that their promotions bank never runs out of rabbits to pull out of the hat.