Understanding retail media: Perspectives and implications for stakeholders

Retail media transforms both the retail and the advertising ecosystem, offering unique opportunities and challenges for consumers, brands, retailers, and regulators. This paper explores retail media through a multi-stakeholder lens, examining its implications from these distinct perspectives. Consumers benefit from personalized shopping experiences but remain concerned about data privacy and ad annoyance. Brand managers see retail media as a critical channel for reaching targeted audiences and driving sales, yet must navigate competitive pressures and incrementality questions. Retailers leverage retail media as a revenue stream and strategic advantage but face the complexities of balancing their roles as platform providers and competitors. Regulators, meanwhile, grapple with ensuring fair competition, data transparency, and consumer protection.

We connect the dots between these four stakeholder perspectives in our dynamic conceptual framework. We link the consumer, brand manager, retailer, and regulator viewpoints in a diamond-shaped model, highlighting shared objectives such as transparency, trust, and innovation. We offer practical advice on these issues based on our retail media experience. Our research questions and review of recent findings underscore the importance of cross-stakeholder collaboration and the need for a balanced approach that maximizes short-term benefits while ensuring long-term value for all participants in the retail media ecosystem