How retailers can use customer data to add value to brand partnerships

Retail is changing fast, and data sits at the centre of that transformation. As the quality of third-party cookies continues to decline, marketers and retailers are seeking smarter, more reliable ways to understand and engage with their customers. 

Retail data partnerships are emerging as one of the most effective strategies, enabling retailers to strengthen brand relationships while unlocking new growth opportunities. By working together to generate customer insights, retailers and their brand partners can uncover opportunities neither side could achieve alone.

In this article, we’ll explore how data partnerships in retail work, the benefits they deliver, and why they’re set to define the future of the industry.

Why retail data partnerships are shaping the future of retail

Retail is no longer just about selling products — it’s about creating experiences that build lasting customer relationships. To deliver those experiences, retailers need access to richer, more reliable data than they can generate on their own. 

That’s where retail data partnerships come in. By partnering with brands, suppliers, and technology partners, retailers can unlock actionable insights that improve everything from product development to marketing effectiveness.

• For brands, these partnerships provide access to high-quality shopper data that sharpens campaign targeting and proves return on investment. 
• For retailers, this creates a new revenue stream and strengthens relationships with strategic partners. 
• For consumers, they lead to more relevant offers, personalized shopping experiences, and better product availability.

The most visible example of this shift today is the rise of retail media networks (RMNs). RMNs enable retailers to monetize their first-party data by selling targeted advertising on their owned and operated channels. They’re a fast-growing source of revenue because they deliver measurable ROI for advertisers and create new income streams for retailers.

Some RMNs even extend to off-site retail media, allowing brands to reach consumers across social media networks, connected TV platforms, or third-party sites using retailer data.

This monetization opportunity is one of the most apparent benefits for retailers today. By providing brand partners with privacy-safe shopper insights, they can leverage their data as a new source of revenue without compromising consumer trust. Read deeper into retail data monetization here.

As third-party cookies decline in quality, these partnerships are becoming even more valuable. Retailers who embrace data partnerships now will gain a competitive advantage — shaping the industry’s future by turning their customer insights into a shared engine for growth.

The benefits of retail data partnerships

When executed effectively, data partnerships between brands and retailers generate value at every stage of the customer journey. 

The benefits can be understood in four key parts:

1. Collaboration and enrichment

Retailers hold transactional data, while brands often bring category-wide or shopper loyalty insights. By combining these, both sides can spot cross-sell opportunities, underperforming categories, or regional blind spots that would be invisible in isolation.

2. Insights and segmentation

Partnering on high-quality data leads to more precise consumer insights. Brands and their retail data partners can refine customer segments, identify lapsed shoppers to re-engage, or detect emerging buying behaviours. These insights inform not just marketing, but also product development, product launches, pricing strategies, and inventory planning.

3. Activation and measurement

Data partnerships make campaigns smarter and more accountable. A retailer might use combined insights to build new lookalike audiences, while brands gain closed-loop attribution to prove which promotions drove sales. This alignment strengthens confidence in marketing spend.

4. Trust and compliance

Partnerships must rest on trust. Retailers who use privacy-enhancing tools to collaborate securely position themselves as reliable partners. Beyond meeting regulation, this becomes a competitive advantage — showing consumers and brands alike that data is handled responsibly.

How retail data partnerships work in practice

At their core, retail data partnerships rely on a secure space where retailers and brands can combine their insights without exposing sensitive information. 

The mechanics vary, but most successful partnerships follow a similar process:

1. Data alignment – Retailers provide first-party transaction data, while brands contribute category- or shopper-level insights. Standardizing formats ensures both sides can work from a common foundation. But because this data cannot be directly exchanged, sent to, or viewed by one another, privacy-preserving technology such as a data clean room becomes necessary.
   
   
2. Collaboration and analysis – The combined dataset reveals patterns neither party could see alone. For example, a retailer may identify which types of customers are trading down in a category, while the brand spots an opportunity to introduce mid-tier products.
   
   
3. Activation – Insights are applied to practical use cases, such as building audiences for retail media campaigns, shaping joint product launches, or refining in-store promotions.
   
   
4. Measurement and optimization – Campaigns and initiatives are tracked to sales outcomes, giving both sides proof of ROI and a basis for refining future strategies.

Successful data collaboration depends on one crucial factor: compliance. Without the right safeguards, many partnerships fail to get off the ground. That’s why retailers and brands are increasingly relying on data clean rooms.

Why data clean rooms are the key to modern retail data partnerships

A data clean room is a secure environment where data from different parties is encrypted and analysed without either side ever handing over raw customer information to the other. Unlike outdated methods of data sharing, raw data never leaves the owner’s control. Instead, each side uploads encrypted datasets that can only be matched and analyzed within strict parameters.

This matters because it removes the two biggest barriers to collaboration: trust and compliance. Retailers don’t have to worry about leaking sensitive transaction data, and brands can be confident they’re working with high-quality insights that meet GDPR and other privacy standards.

For retail, the applications are powerful. 

Let’s take a practical example. A cosmetics brand wants to improve its shopper marketing strategy, attract new customers, and prove the effectiveness of its marketing investments. On its own, the brand only sees sales volume. With a clean room, it can work with a retailer to unlock three powerful use cases:

• Insights – By matching their first-party data with the retailer’s data, the cosmetics brand can see not just how many products sold, but who is buying them and how these shoppers behave across categories. This might reveal, for example, that premium skincare buyers are also highly engaged in seasonal promotions. These insights form the foundation for more effective activation strategies.
  
  
• Activation –  Building on those insights, the cosmetics brand, for instance, can create lookalikes to reach new prospects or exclude existing customers to focus acquisition spend where it will yield the best ROI.
  
  
• Measurement – Instead of relying on proxy metrics, the brand can directly connect campaign impressions to in-store sales, proving ROI and refining future spend.

These same principles are powering the next wave of retail media networks: helping retailers extend campaigns beyond their owned channels into premium publishers and CTV, while providing brands with the proof of sales impact they need.

With these capabilities, data clean rooms are quickly becoming the infrastructure that enables retail data partnerships at scale. Without them, collaborations risk being slow, fragmented, or too risky to justify.

Unlocking growth through privacy-first retail partnerships

The future of retail won’t be defined by who owns the most data, but by who can use it to create the most value for both partners and consumers. Retail data partnerships show that retailers and brands achieve greater success when they collaborate than when they keep insights locked away.

Data clean rooms are making this shift possible. They turn customer insights into a shared foundation for growth, without ever compromising privacy.

For forward-looking retailers and brands, the question is no longer if to collaborate, but how quickly to build the partnerships that will set tomorrow’s winners apart.

See how Decentriq’s data clean rooms can help you monetize your retail data — or learn more about how to become a Decentriq data partner to unlock new revenue streams.