Consumers continue to demonstrate a new willingness to switch brands as inflation rises and supply chains leave spaces on physical shelves and in online shopping carts. Ad targeting that relies heavily on data and precision can sometimes bring customers back — but not always.

About 70% of U.S. shoppers said they purchased a new or different brand than they had prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing a survey conducted from May 2020 to August 2021 by private-label consulting company Daymon Worldwide.

Merkle recently announced the expansion of its partnership with Snowflake. a data cloud warehouse used by companies like DoorDash, that will allow brands to improve their customer experience through what the company calls “enhanced data predictability,” setting them up for further success as consumers continually change their minds about where — and from what brands — they will purchase goods and services.

CMOs and CIOs are taking another look at the way they store their data assets. They want to modernize their legacy technology and store the data in the cloud, said Ankur Jain, the global cloud and data practice at Merkle.

“All the major clients that we have are looking at Snowflake for either its data-sharing capability or multicloud architecture,” he said. “You can run Snowflake in any major cloud platform, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.”

Jain said these features drove the partnership between Merkle and Snowflake.

Some of the biggest challenges driving the partnership include identity resolution, cookie deprecation, and the fact that brands want to align more with their first-party data, integrating second- and third-party data.

Snowflake has been investing in its data ecosystem. This week the company announced the launch of its Retail Data Cloud, which integrates the core Snowflake platform with partner solutions and industry datasets.

It partnered with Amazon Web Services to bring Amazon’s sales-channel data into customers’ Snowflake data warehouse. Venture Beat initially reported the news of the agreement.

Merkle, with this partnership, became a Select Tier Services Partner. It makes acquiring, testing, and integrating third-party data seamless. Snowflake users can take the expanded third-party data into their environment, append to their first-party data, and evaluate the data’s efficacy and impact on their customer experience efforts.

These enhancements are done with privacy in mind through a secure sharing platform that does not require setting up additional secure portals to support personally identifiable information sharing. 

“Data sources think of this as hundreds and thousands of attributes that can enrich first-party data, such as lifestyle information,” he said. “Through the Snowflake marketplace, we can monetize the data. The traditional way meant shifting the file to the customer, and someone would need to load it into the database. Now, all we need to do is press a button.”

Consumers continue to demonstrate a new willingness to switch brands as inflation rises and supply chains leave gaps on physical shelves and in online shopping carts. Ad targeting that relies heavily on data and precision can sometimes bring customers back, but not always.