What Walmart's CMO Told Me About the Future of the Store

Hi there,

I was just in Bentonville and sat in on a talk from William White, Chief Marketing Officer at Walmart.

He described marketing's job as creating and capturing demand, and changing what people believe about Walmart, including that it's a tech-led company.

I took voracious notes. Three ideas keep coming back to me.

1. The store is still the biggest marketing asset in retail

William called stores Walmart's number one marketing asset. He said about 150 million people walk through them every week, and roughly 80% of the business still happens in-store.

Walmart is doubling down on stores, too. The company plans more than 650 store remodels this year alone [1].

But along with that, he said a store-only customer becomes about 6x more valuable once Walmart brings them online too. That’s the power of touching a customer omnichannel. Same person, same stores. The difference is that Walmart knows who they are and can reach them between visits.

The biggest retailer in the world isn't trying to pull shoppers out of the store. It's trying to turn store shoppers into known customers.

Most omnichannel brands have that exact problem, just at a different scale. Your product sits on that shelf in front of those shoppers. The sale happens. And for most brands, the buyer disappears the second they walk out the door.

The store was never the problem. Not knowing who bought from it is.

2. Walmart is feeding its first-party data into Meta. Are you?

That's what Walmart Connect, its retail media business, is doing. Advertisers can run social campaigns on Walmart's shopper audiences and measure them against Walmart sales through a clean room with Meta [2].

It's a smart move. Walmart has the purchase data, so Walmart gets to tell Meta who the real buyers are. The algorithm learns from actual purchases instead of clicks.

Then a concern came up in the room: who gets to see the data?

I'd push every brand to sit with that question. When you buy through a retailer's network, you're renting access to your own customers. The retailer keeps the relationship. You get a campaign report.

The brands winning right now do both. They buy retail media where it makes sense. They also build their own verified buyer signal from retail purchases, and send it into their own Meta, Google and TikTok Ads accounts and their CRM. That way the algorithm optimizes on total sales, not just the slice that happens on their site.

Walmart already figured out that purchase data is the best fuel for ads. The question is whether your ad accounts are running on yours.

3. "Data rich, insight poor" is a choice

William described old Walmart as "data rich, insight poor." Plenty of data, not enough of it turning into action.

What's changed is how fast they act on it now. Walmart has an internal team that builds AI agents. One agent rewrites product detail pages, and he said that alone drove about a 10% SEO lift.

Their shopping agent, Sparky, now lives inside ChatGPT too [3]. Shopping more and more starts inside a platform someone else owns, and Walmart wants to be there when it does.

He also talked about optimizing for AI agents, not just search engines, and said it converts better than traditional SEO. If you read my note on Ekta Chopra at E.L.F. a few months ago, this will sound familiar. Your product content is now your brief to the AI.

They even brought creative in-house. He described a 150-person studio in LA that runs at about a third of the cost of an agency.

The common thread is that Walmart stopped letting data sit in dashboards. Every piece of it now has a job.

Most brands I talk to are still where old Walmart was. They have retail sales reports, loyalty exports, receipts and registrations, all sitting in silos. None of it reaches the ad platforms or the email flows.

If the biggest retailer in the world is working this hard to know who's in its aisles, how well do you know who's buying from yours?

Talk soon,

Kait

Connect with me on LinkedIn

A few extras:

Some of my favorite brands are hiring…

1. Ritual - Vice President, Omnichannel Media

2. Purple - Sr. Manager, Marketing Operations

Sources

[1] Retail Dive, "Walmart continues aggressive store updates and expansion drive."

[2] Walmart Connect, "How we're expanding retail-powered social media."

[3] Retail Dive, "Walmart brings Sparky to ChatGPT as OpenAI rethinks Instant Checkout."

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