A Deep Dive into Insights Organizations for Retailers: Lessons from Consumer Products

In today’s retail landscape, data is everywhere—but actionable insight is rare. Retailers are awash in information from e-commerce, in-store transactions, loyalty programs, supply chains, and social media. Yet, many struggle to translate this data into decisions that drive growth, efficiency, and customer loyalty. Consumer products (CP) companies have faced similar challenges and, in recent years, have made significant strides in building effective insights organizations. By examining the CP playbook and adapting its lessons for retail’s unique realities, retailers can unlock the full value of their data and build insights organizations that deliver measurable business impact.

The Retail Data Challenge: Complexity, Speed, and Silos

Retailers operate in a world of omnichannel complexity. Unlike many CP firms, retailers have direct, real-time access to customer behavior across digital and physical touchpoints. This creates both opportunity and challenge:

Omnichannel Data Integration: Retailers must unify data from online, mobile, in-store, and third-party sources to create a single view of the customer and inventory.
Rapid Inventory Turnover: With fast-moving SKUs and fluctuating demand, insights must be timely and actionable to inform pricing, promotions, and replenishment.
Direct Consumer Engagement: Retailers have the advantage of direct relationships, but must personalize experiences at scale to remain competitive.
Persistent Data Silos: Legacy systems, fragmented technology stacks, and organizational boundaries often prevent data from flowing freely across the business.

Lessons from Consumer Products: Building Blocks of an Insights Organization

Consumer products companies have learned that simply collecting data is not enough. The real value comes from turning data into insight, and insight into action. Four foundational pillars have emerged as critical to building a successful insights organization:

Data: Standardize and integrate first- and third-party data across all touchpoints. Confidence in data quality is essential—without it, adoption and impact suffer.
Logic: Develop robust models to resolve identities, predict behaviors, and segment customers. This enables advanced analytics such as churn prediction, propensity modeling, and personalized recommendations.
Experiences: Syndicate insights across channels—email, media, in-store, and digital—to ensure consistent, relevant engagement. Sharing audience insights across marketing and media teams enables smarter retargeting, suppression, and lookalike modeling.
Measurement: Move beyond basic KPIs to measure performance against expectations and momentum. Use dashboards and attribution models to inform spend, optimization, and strategic pivots.

Adapting the Playbook for Retail: Organizational and Operational Considerations

While the foundational pillars are universal, retailers must tailor their approach to their unique context:

Centralized vs. Decentralized Insights Teams: Retailers must decide whether to embed insights staff within business units (to build deep subject matter expertise) or centralize them for scale and consistency. Many find success with a federated model—central standards and tools, with local flexibility.
Defining the Right Problems: Too often, organizations collect data without a clear sense of the business questions they need to answer. Retailers should start by identifying the key decisions that drive value—such as assortment planning, pricing, and customer experience—and build insights capabilities around those needs.
Quality Control and Governance: As insights teams scale, the risk of errors and inconsistent analysis grows. Retailers must invest in data governance, clear KPI definitions, and robust quality assurance processes to maintain trust and credibility.
Change Management and Adoption: The best insights are useless if they aren’t used. Retailers should treat internal stakeholders as customers—understand their needs, preferred ways of consuming insights (dashboards, reports, embedded analytics), and provide training and support to drive adoption.

Overcoming Retail’s Unique Barriers

Retailers face several challenges that require special attention:

Profitability Pressures: E-commerce growth has often come at the expense of margins. Insights organizations can help by identifying cost-saving opportunities in supply chain, optimizing promotions, and supporting data-driven pricing.
Returns and Reverse Logistics: High return rates erode profits. By analyzing return patterns and customer behaviors, insights teams can recommend changes to product information, sizing, and fulfillment strategies to reduce returns.
Supply Chain Volatility: Real-time data and predictive analytics can help retailers anticipate disruptions, optimize inventory, and improve demand forecasting.
Data Monetization: Retailers are increasingly leveraging their data assets to create new revenue streams, such as retail media networks. Insights organizations play a key role in enabling and measuring these initiatives.

Case in Point: Insights in Action

Retailers that have invested in robust insights organizations are seeing tangible results. For example, one major retailer ingested trillions of rows of data to understand customer journeys across digital and physical channels. By analyzing purchase patterns—such as customers adding camping gear to their cart—they were able to recommend complementary products (like batteries and games), resulting in a threefold increase in basket size and a doubling of average order value. These insights also enabled the retailer to monetize their digital shelf by selling targeted ad space to suppliers, creating a new profit center.

Another retailer used advanced analytics to identify and segment high-return customers, enabling them to adjust return policies and optimize fulfillment strategies. By integrating data across the organization, they improved both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

The Path Forward: Actionable Recommendations for Retail Leaders

Start with the Business Problem: Identify the key decisions and pain points where better insights can drive measurable value. Build your data and analytics capabilities around these priorities.
Invest in Data Quality and Integration: Standardize data collection, resolve identities, and break down silos to create a unified view of customers and operations.
Build a Flexible, Federated Insights Organization: Balance central standards and tools with local expertise and agility. Empower business units while maintaining governance and quality.
Focus on Adoption and Change Management: Treat internal stakeholders as customers. Provide training, support, and tailored delivery formats to maximize impact.
Measure What Matters: Go beyond vanity metrics. Use advanced measurement and attribution to inform strategy, optimize spend, and demonstrate ROI.
Innovate and Test: Foster a culture of experimentation. Use test-and-learn approaches to pilot new models, channels, and experiences—then scale what works.

Conclusion

Retailers have a unique opportunity to leapfrog traditional barriers by learning from the consumer products sector and adapting proven insights strategies to their own context. By building insights organizations that are data-driven, business-focused, and relentlessly customer-centric, retailers can unlock new sources of growth, efficiency, and competitive advantage. The future belongs to those who turn data into action—now is the time to build the insights organization that will power retail’s next era.