Unilever Eager to Tap Into Walmart’s New On- and Off-Site Consumer Insights

Unilever is bullish on the consumer insights they expect to leverage within Walmart’s new Digital Landscape offering. 

Announced earlier this week and currently in beta, Walmart’s self-serve solution within its Luminate platform promises more granular insights about the retailer’s dot-com and mobile shoppers. CPGs will be able to analyze online shopper behavior before a purchase, with the intent of helping them more effectively engage and influence purchase behavior.  

Already an existing Walmart Luminate user, Unilever will use the enhanced information about where shoppers discover and purchase their products to refine their retail strategies, Sarah Malinski, Unilever chief digital commerce officer for the U.S., told CGT. 

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“We want to understand the full customer journey, even before a transaction occurs,” she noted. “For example, we want to know the extent that customers add to cart directly from search results vs. engage with the product description page.”

Retail Data Sharing

While CPGs have done a lot of work to better obtain and leverage consumer insights, the keys to the insights kingdom remain firmly in retailers’ hands — with the grasp only tightening thanks to the disappearance of the third-party cookie and the growth of retail media. Twenty-six percent of consumer goods leaders in CGT’s “2024 Retail and Consumer Goods Analytics Study” said their retail partners aren’t sharing customer behavior data at all. 

With this new offering, slated for general availability later this summer, Walmart expects to provide manufacturers with much-needed product-discovery insights, including where consumers first start looking for products and when they find them. The retailer also promises to share more information about the path to purchase and how products stack up against others in the same category.  

By having access to better and earlier visibility into the Walmart shopper journey, Malinski said Unilever will in turn be able to optimize their approach to these consumers.