It’s no secret that the retail dynamic is complicated right now — brands are fighting for every conversion in an increasingly expensive ad environment where consumers are less loyal and more price-conscious.
But Walmart thinks it has the answer, for its own suppliers at least — making its robust slate of first-party data on shopper behavior and supply chain journeys available to brands via the Walmart Luminate suite of insights tools.
“Walmart customers and all consumers are trying to get the most for their dollars — it’s a tough world for all of us,” said Mark Hardy, SVP and Head of Walmart Data Ventures in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Being able to understand your customers and what they need helps you meet expectations better, and doing the same things you did last year isn’t going to always work. So how do you refine it? How do you get more granular? How do you become more targeted to make sure you are helping your customers? We’re helping Walmart’s customers at the end of the day by making sure that [our suppliers] are front and center when they are relevant to the customer. What data allows you to do is, in tough times, make the right moves.”
This week at the second annual Inspire event, Walmart’s Data Ventures division unveiled new ways it’s helping its suppliers and merchants do just that, including:
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- Introducing new ways to connect Luminate insights to advertising recommendations via its Walmart Connect media network;
- Building its reach among small- and mid-sized suppliers; and
- Debuting a new offering that gives brands insight into pre-purchase shopper behaviors.
But First…a Name Change
Before we get to all the meaty data stuff, there was one other big announcement to come out of Inspire this week — starting at the beginning of Walmart’s fiscal 2025, on Feb. 5, Walmart Luminate will become Scintilla.
“We like the name Scintilla because it’s a nod to Walmart’s legacy, the spark, but it’s also a play on what we believe is the value of the platform, which is that you can take the smallest amount of data and create an insight that ignites a big decision,” explained Hardy. “It represents the future of where we are going.”
As part of the rebrand, the solution will also do away with the Walmart genus to go simply by Scintilla, although it is still wholly a Walmart product. Hard as it may be for those of us in the U.S. to imagine, the Walmart name doesn’t carry the same level of name recognition in all global markets, not to mention that in many international regions Walmart operates under other banners. As the Luminate (soon to be Scintilla) offering expands beyond the U.S., having Walmart as part of the name made less sense, said Hardy. And it is expanding — Luminate launched in Mexico earlier this summer and will be made available in Canada later this month.
Increasing the Connection with Connect
The other big announcement out of Inspire was that the Walmart Luminate “Insights Activation” for Walmart Connect is now available to all suppliers in the paid Charter tier. The solution — which lets suppliers apply Walmart Luminate insights to inform and optimize their display advertising campaigns through the Walmart Connect retail media offering — launched in beta in April and promises to be a boon for both of these tertiary Walmart services.
Hardy described the tool as “a recommendation engine that will allow our suppliers to understand what their opportunities are to market to or engage customers and link customer behavior to advertising strategy,” all facilitated through a self-serve, automated tool.
“It’s not about digging through the data anymore and trying to find that needle in the haystack,” Hardy explained. “The recommendation engine is literally going to be continuously updating and finding opportunities. So when you go in, it will tell you, by item, [that] you have an opportunity for building awareness or customer acquisition. It links the behavior back to a potential strategy and allows the supplier to then simply check the box of what they want to do.
“What we used to be looking at, for our first years [of the business], was creating a single version of truth. Now we’re moving into activation — what can you do with the data?” Hardy added. “It’s changing the question that we’re answering: Where before it was, “How did I do?’ Now, by being able to take this data and using AI, it’s ‘What should I do to drive the business?’”
Why Smaller Suppliers are Leveraging Luminate
Not surprisingly, Walmart suppliers have been eager to get their hands on the Luminate tools and insights. In fact, since last year, Luminate’s client base has grown 173%, and every supplier that was up for renewal this year signed on for at least another three years. “We’ve been very fortunate because what we’re doing is driving insights that allow the merchants and suppliers to collaborate, which is ultimately driving value for the suppliers and for Walmart, so it’s a mutual win,” said Hardy. (Not to mention that Walmart gets additional revenue in the form of subscription fees.)
Interestingly, much of the growth this year has come from smaller suppliers. “A year and a half ago, the pioneers that were jumping in were companies that are very comfortable with data and have a lot of data,” Hardy explained. “What we’ve seen over the last year is a lot of small and mid-sized companies coming in, because they’ve realized it’s the same information for every company. Walmart Luminate evens the playing field, so now even small or mid-sized companies can have the same conversation with the merchants to help drive their business.”
Now, more than 50% of the Luminate client base is made up of smaller Walmart suppliers, and the solution also is finding traction with suppliers in new categories as well. As one would expect, the first crop of suppliers to take up the offering came predominantly from the consumables and food sectors, but now Hardy said the platform is experiencing growth with a range of general merchandise categories and even apparel.
“When you start talking about things like seasonal categories or apparel, [where the products] change every year, [the initial reaction can be] ‘Why do I need to know the history of all this?’” said Hardy. “But one of the modules we offer, Customer Perception, lets brands engage with customers for product development or to understand what customers want, and that has been very, very useful in those kinds of categories.
“We’ve actually engaged our community more than 2.4 million times [this year through Customer Perception],” Hardy added. “That kind of engagement with the customer didn’t exist before. It’s one of the areas where we can really distinguish our data, because you’re taking stated behavior or intent and linking it to actual behavior, so you can see the impact.”
Completing the Data Circle with Pre-Purchase Insights
Walmart Luminate has three core modules:
- Shopper Behavior, which offers insight into purchase and post-purchase behavior;
- Channel Performance, which offers end-to-end supply chain visibility; and
- Customer Perception, which, as Hardy explained, allows suppliers to engage with an opted-in community of Walmart customers to understand “the why behind the buy.”
Last month Walmart added a fourth module, Digital Landscapes, which collates pre-purchase behavior from customers’ online activity on the Walmart website and app: what people are searching for, when they were searching and shopping, how they engage with product detail pages and what they eventually buy. This latest offering brings the Luminate data solution full circle, alongside the latest module addition of Insights Activation for Walmart Connect.
“The entire world of retail is getting a lot more complex, because if we don’t delight the customer, they have many choices to go somewhere else,” said Hardy. “It’s important for us to have the data so we can completely understand how to get the right product in the right place at the right time. The Luminate platform, and our strategy around it, was really about being able to understand the journey of a product from source to store, and the journey of a customer from home to that point of conversion, a shelf, whether it’s digital or physical. As we continue to build out that connection of the journey of the product and journey of the customer, we get smarter and smarter together with our suppliers about how to engage and how to create that right experience.”
