Most FMCG brands know their category numbers. They do not necessarily know their consumers. The retailer owns the transaction, the data, and the relationship. But, that can change. An untapped engagement channel for a direct consumer relationship is now available to FMCG brands that want one, without requiring them to change how or where they sell.
Somewhere in a supermarket this morning, someone bought your product. You do not know who they are. You know roughly how many units moved through that store this week, because the retailer tells you, when it suits them, in the format they choose, at the level of aggregation they are comfortable with. You know the category is up or down. You do not know the person.
This is not a new problem. It is the founding condition of most consumer goods businesses. The retailer owns the shelf, the transaction, and the consumer relationship. The brand owns the product and the marketing spend. That arrangement has worked well enough for long enough that most FMCG businesses have built their entire operating model around it. Brand tracking. Category management. Shopper research. Trade investment. All of it is designed to influence a consumer the brand cannot reach directly.
The consequence is a specific kind of blindness. Only 43% of consumer goods leaders say they are completely satisfied with their ability to leverage customer insights from retailers, according to Consumer Goods Technology research. The other 57% are making brand decisions with partial information, mediated by a channel partner whose interests do not always align with theirs. The retailer knows which consumers lapsed. The retailer knows which consumers switched from your product to a competitor's. The brand finds out in the next category review, if at all.
The industry's response has been to pursue DTC. Build a website, sell direct, own the transaction data. For some categories (premium products, subscriptions, high-involvement purchases) this works. For the majority of FMCG, it does not. Consumers buy their breakfast cereal from a supermarket because that is where breakfast cereal is. No loyalty programme or e-commerce platform changes the fundamental purchase behaviour. DTC is not available to most FMCG brands at meaningful scale, and the brands pursuing it are often spending heavily to acquire customers who could have been reached far more efficiently through the existing retail relationship.
FMCG brands have not sat entirely still in the face of this problem. Below-the-line activations, prize competitions, scan-to-win promotions, and email acquisition campaigns have long served as partial bridges to the individual consumer. These mechanics work, up to a point. A well-run on-pack promotion generates an email list. A loyalty programme builds a database. A social campaign acquires followers. What they capture, though, is relatively thin: an email address that sits in a database until the next campaign, a social follower who may or may not see the next post, a one-time interaction with no reliable channel forward. The wallet pass does not replace these mechanics. It amplifies what they can capture.
The more interesting question is whether a brand needs to own the transaction to own the consumer relationship. The answer is no, and that is where the structural shift is happening.
A wallet pass activated at the moment of product interaction, through a code on-pack, a shelf-edge prompt, or a promotion mechanic at the point of purchase or pop-up, establishes a direct connection between the brand and the individual consumer without touching the retailer's transaction at all. The consumer completes an action, adds the pass to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet in one tap, and from that point the brand has something it has never had before: a direct, identified channel to a person who demonstrably chose to interact with the brand.
That channel is not static, and this is where the creative opportunity opens up. The pass can push a notification to the lock screen when a new product launches, when a seasonal promotion activates, or when a reward is available. It can update in real time as the consumer reaches a milestone: a points balance that ticks up after a purchase, a reward that unlocks at a specific threshold, a gamified mechanic that keeps the brand present between shopping trips without requiring the consumer to do anything more than glance at a notification. The experience can be built around moments that feel personal rather than broadcast.
Crucially, the geo-trigger mechanic works in the retailer's favour, not against it. A notification that fires when a consumer is near a supermarket stocking the brand's product drives them toward the shelf, not away from it. A time-limited offer that expires on Sunday creates urgency that converts at point of sale. Retailers remain the channel through which the product moves. The wallet pass gives the brand the ability to influence the consumer before they reach the aisle, in a way that benefits both.
Getting a consumer to add the pass in the first place requires something worth adding: an offer, a reward, a reason. That activation mechanic, whether a scan-to-win, a first-purchase discount, or a loyalty enrolment prompt, is the entry point. Once the pass is in the wallet, the channel is open.
The data that comes back from these interactions is a different quality from anything most FMCG brands currently work with. Not aggregate sales volumes. Not category panel data with a six-week lag. Individual consumer behaviour: who activated, who responded to which notification, which messages drove a return purchase, which consumers engaged across multiple products in the portfolio. The difference between knowing what your category sold and understanding what your consumers do is the difference between managing a brand and building a relationship.
This is not a marginal capability improvement. For brands that have operated for decades without knowing who their consumers are, it is a structural shift in what is possible. The consumer who scanned the pack, added the pass, and accepted a notification has given the brand something no retailer can provide and no media buy can replicate: a voluntary, direct, individual connection. The pass is the channel. The data is the asset. And neither of them required the brand to sell a single unit outside the retail environment it already operates in.
The owned data dimension deserves particular attention as AI tools become standard in marketing operations. An email address in a database is a thin signal. An individual consumer profile built from real interactions, what they activated on, which offers they responded to, where they were when they engaged, what they ignored, is the kind of data that makes personalisation meaningful rather than approximate. The brands building that profile now are not just acquiring consumers. They are building an asset that compounds over time and becomes more useful as the tools to act on it improve.
Many brands will not pursue this yet, and that is understandable. What is worth being clear about is that this is not an either/or proposition. A wallet pass programme does not ask a brand to abandon its trade investment, retire its email list, or walk away from the retail partnerships that move the product. It sits on top of what already works and adds a depth of consumer engagement that was not previously accessible at the individual level. The risk of experimenting is low precisely because nothing is replaced. What is added is a direct, interactive, owned relationship with the people buying the product — something the existing stack, for all its value, has never quite been able to provide.
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