Hi there,
I've been on the road for most of the last month. Bentonville with Endeavor, to Groceryshop, to Shoptalk Fall.
Three very different rooms - grocery operators, brand and retail marketers, and the Walmart ecosystem - but a few themes surfaced across them all.
At Groceryshop, the main conversation was retail media. It's a growing, performance-driven channel and a real lever for retail velocity. But every retail media network is platform-exclusive, and that's not how anyone shops.
Meanwhile, social has historically been judged on DTC sales. Yet it's clearly creating demand that gets captured in retail. If most of your sales happen at retail, that gap is your whole business.
Shoptalk took it further. The funnel is collapsing. Discovery, consideration and purchase now happen in the same moment, often somewhere the brand doesn't own: a TikTok Shop video, an AI shopping agent, an Amazon listing.
SharkNinja's Michelle Crossan-Matos made the same point in her keynote. Their growth plan leans on social, affiliates and reviews, built for the channels where shoppers already buy. Create the demand upstream. Capture it wherever the shopper is.
My favorite example was Brunt Workwear. They built serious demand on Meta and social before they ever went into wholesale. When they launched with 23 retail partners [1], sales showed up right away. The way they described it, it was like opening a valve. The demand was already there. Retail just captured it.
In Bentonville, Walmart CMO William White described marketing's job as creating and capturing demand. He also shared that about 80% of Walmart's business still happens in-store.
Think about that for a second. The place demand gets created is rarely the place you can see it convert.
This one came through loud and clear in Bentonville.
William called Walmart's stores its #1 marketing asset. Roughly 150 million people walk through them every week, and Walmart is remodeling about 600 stores a year. The big push is moving store-only shoppers into omnichannel relationships. By his account, a customer brought online is about six times more valuable.
The largest retailer in the world is treating the physical store as media and as the start of a digital relationship.
Brunt does a scrappier version of the same thing. If you don't know them, Brunt makes workwear and boots for people in the trades. They built the brand online and opened their first flagship store this year [2]. At Shoptalk, they said their real edge is knowing exactly who their customer is, and the store is a big part of how they keep it that way. It doubles as a listening post, a place to hear directly from the people who wear their gear every day. There's even a "think tank" room behind a portable potty to keep that feedback loop going. I loved that detail.
The lesson for brands is simple. The shelf isn't only where a sale happens. It's the one moment you're physically in front of your buyer. That's your chance to extend the aisle and turn an unknown shopper into a known one.
William White used "data rich, insight poor" to describe the old Walmart. Walmart sees more transactions than almost anyone, and it still struggled to turn that into a clear read on its customer. His #1 priority now is understanding how people want to shop today and where that's heading.
At Groceryshop, the issue was fragmentation. Every retail media network reports on its own shelf. A brand selling through five retailers gets five partial views, with no way to connect them to what its social spend is doing.
In Bentonville, a CPG commercial leader walked me through what it costs just to see his own sales. Scan data is the point-of-sale data that tells brands how fast product moves off the shelf. It comes from syndicated providers like Circana and Nielsen, and his quote came in around $500K a year. In convenience stores, one of his most important channels, that data barely exists. He's spending to grow a channel he can't see.
Kurt Haas, who has spent years in store replenishment and enterprise architecture at QuikTrip and Kroger, said it plainly: data is table stakes. His example was using SKU-level sales data to catch "phantom inventory," product the system says is on the shelf but isn't. The data was there all along. The value came from acting on it.
So what does insight-rich actually look like?
SharkNinja’s Michelle Crossan-Matos called right now a "golden age for marketing," with more insight than she's ever seen. SharkNinja built direct lines to its buyers through social listening, reviews, and creators, with AI running across all of it [3]. And it shows up in real decisions. They launch about 25 products a year, and nothing ships unless it rates 4.5 or above with consumers.
That's the how. The brands with real insight hear from their buyers constantly and put what they hear into the decisions they make every day.
But you can’t listen to a customer you can’t see. For most omnichannel brands, that's the gap. The majority of their sales happen at retail and on marketplaces, where the buyer is anonymous.
For brands, the most valuable use of retail data is getting that purchase data into the places that make decisions every day: Meta, Google and TikTok Ads, and your CRM.
Demand gets built upstream. It gets captured in stores and marketplaces you don't own. And the faster the funnel collapses, the bigger that blind spot gets.
The brands that are truly insight-rich right now are treating the shelf as the start of the relationship, not the end of the funnel.
Talk soon,
Kait
Some of my favorite brands are hiring…
1. Little Spoon - COO
2. Steve Madden - Associate Manager, Growth Marketing
[1] Modern Retail, "Brunt enters wholesale through 23 retail partners"
[2] BRUNT Workwear press release via GlobeNewswire, April 30, 2026
[3] Ad Age, on how SharkNinja mines consumer insights through AI and social listening
Kait’s free Sunday newsie on what’s next in performance marketing, AI, and omnichannel growth.
