Airlines know who you fly with and when. Hotels know your preferences. Streaming services know what you watch at 11pm on a Thursday. CPG brands — despite selling to the same people multiple times a week — know almost nothing about their individual shoppers.
The data access divide
Every major consumer category has built a direct data relationship with its customers. Retail banks have transaction histories. Telecoms have usage data. Hospitality, travel, entertainment — all of them have individual-level purchase and behaviour data that sits with the brand, not the distribution channel.
CPG is the exception. A brand selling a product that tens of millions of people buy every week has, in most cases, no idea who those people are, how often they buy, whether they're increasing or decreasing frequency, or when they switch to a competitor.
The transactional data exists. It sits with Tesco, Sainsbury's, ASDA, Boots, Ocado. The brand is the last to see it — and only through aggregated, retailer-curated reports that are designed to sell media, not to build the brand's understanding of its own shoppers.
Why this happened and why it's now a structural problem
For most of CPG's history, this wasn't a competitive disadvantage. The category operated through physical retail, brand built awareness through broadcast media, and the transaction happened in a store the brand didn't own. There was no practical mechanism for a direct shopper relationship, and no particular competitive pressure to build one.
That logic held until data became the primary source of competitive intelligence — and until every other consumer category figured out how to build direct relationships regardless of distribution channel.
The airline doesn't own the airport. The hotel doesn't own the booking platform. They built first-party data relationships anyway, because the commercial case was clear: brands with direct shopper data make better decisions faster than those routing everything through an intermediary.
CPG hasn't made that shift at scale. And the window to do so is narrowing.
What you're missing without it
The absence of first-party data in CPG isn't just a measurement inconvenience. It has concrete commercial implications.
Without individual purchase history across your portfolio, you can't see cross-sell signals — which shoppers who buy product A are most likely to convert to product B, or which cohort is ripe for a new SKU launch.
Without cohort-level churn data, you can't see frequency decline before it shows up in aggregate rate-of-sale figures — which means you're always reacting to problems rather than anticipating them.
Without a direct communication channel, every message to your shopper is routed through the retailer's media environment. You pay for access to people who are already your customers, on terms set by the retailer.
Without purchase-level insight at SKU resolution, product development decisions rely on category trends and consumer research rather than observed buying behaviour. The signal that actually predicts what will sell sits in the transaction data you don't have.
Why the retailer relationship doesn't fill this gap
The instinct is to point to retailer data partnerships as the solution. Tesco's Data Ventures programme, Sainsbury's Nectar360, Boots Advantage data — these do provide access to shopper-level insights that brands wouldn't otherwise see.
But access is conditional. It's on the retailer's terms, at the retailer's cadence, in the retailer's format. The data is shaped to serve the retailer's commercial interest, which is to sell media and shelf space — not to give brands a complete picture of their shopper base.
More fundamentally: data accessed through a retailer's programme is data about shoppers at that retailer. It can't tell you what those shoppers are doing across the rest of their grocery basket, at other retailers, or in response to your competitors' activity elsewhere. It's a partial view sold as a complete solution.
The retailer's interest in keeping brands media-dependent is not aligned with the brand's interest in building an independent shopper intelligence capability.
How CPG brands build first-party data relationships
The mechanism is a direct value exchange with the shopper. Give them a compelling reason to identify themselves in connection with a real purchase — and capture verified transaction data in return.
Cashback on verified purchases, lifestyle rewards, exclusive access — all of these work if the offer is genuinely compelling and the friction is low. The critical design requirement is that the data generated is tied to actual purchases, not just registrations or engagement. A brand app with a million downloads that doesn't capture purchase data isn't a first-party data asset. It's an engagement metric.
The other requirement is cross-retailer scope. A first-party data programme that only captures behaviour at one retailer builds a partial picture — worse, it builds a picture that's structurally identical to what the retailer would share anyway. The value comes from seeing the shopper across their full retail behaviour, not within a single store's walls.
The window is narrowing
Retailers are building their own media and data businesses aggressively. As those businesses mature, the leverage gap between retailer and brand grows. Brands that haven't built independent shopper data assets will find themselves increasingly dependent on purchasing access to insights about their own customers.
The brands that move now — building verified purchase relationships directly with shoppers, cross-retailer, at SKU level — are building a data asset that compounds in value over time and that no retailer can replicate or restrict.
Vela gives CPG brands the infrastructure to do that: verified purchase rewards that create the value exchange, cross-retailer tracking that builds the full picture, and SKU-level data that sits with the brand — not the retailer.
