GROW: A Roadmap for Retail Media Maturity
Where Is Your Retail Media Business Today?
Retail media continues to dominate retail industry conversations. New networks are launching, supplier investment is growing and retailers are looking for new ways to monetise existing assets.
Yet some key questions keep coming up: “Where do we start?” and for others, it's slightly different: “We’ve already started. But how do we know if we’re on the right track?”
Retail media isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. Some retailers are still defining their proposition. Others have established programmes but are navigating the challenges that come with growth. A smaller number (in Ireland at least) are as yet focused on optimisation, yield improvement and long-term scale.
The challenge isn’t understanding that retail media matters. It’s understanding where your business sits today and what the next step should be.
Why We Developed GROW
Having worked with retailers on supplier-funded marketing and retail media for more than two decades, we’ve seen that every retailer’s journey is different. But the same questions keep emerging regardless of size, sector or market:
Where do we start?
What should we prioritise?
What capabilities are we missing?
What does good look like?
To help answer those questions, we developed the GROW Framework, a practical retail media maturity model that helps retailers understand where they are today and what opportunities lie ahead.
G - Ground
Every successful retail media network starts with strong foundations. At this stage, retailers are defining their proposition, identifying available inventory, establishing commercial structures and putting the operational processes in place to deliver campaigns consistently.
The fundamental questions are:
What are we selling?
Why would suppliers invest?
What assets do we have?
How do we activate campaigns consistently?
Without these foundations, growth is difficult to sustain.
R - Refine
Once the foundations are in place, attention shifts to scaling and strengthening the proposition.
Retailers expand inventory, improve compliance, refine operational processes and develop a more sophisticated understanding of capacity and yield. Lessons from the early stages are formalised into repeatable ways of working.
The focus moves from simply delivering campaigns to delivering them consistently and efficiently.
Key questions at this stage:
Where are the gaps in our inventory?
What’s breaking under volume?
How do we make this repeatable?
O - Optimise
As the retail media business matures, optimisation becomes the priority. Technology, data, measurement and commercial performance play an increasingly important role. Retailers focus on improving yield, enhancing margins, increasing efficiency and making decisions based on performance data.
At this stage, retail media evolves from an opportunity into a strategic business capability.
Key questions at this stage:
How do we improve yield and margins?
Are we using data to its full potential?
What does a scalable, efficient operation look like?
W - Win
Win is not a stage. It’s the outcome. Progress through Ground, Refine and Optimise builds a retail media business that delivers value for retailers, brands and shoppers alike—built on solid foundations, capable of scaling sustainably and ready to adapt to future opportunities.
So, Where Are You Today?
Are you still establishing the foundations? Refining and scaling an existing proposition? Or focused on optimisation and long-term performance?
Understanding where you are today is the first step towards deciding where to invest next. If you’d like to explore where your retail media business sits on the GROW maturity curve, get in touch.
The journey looks different for every retailer; what matters is knowing what comes next.
This was originally featured in the Radar fortnightly newsletter. For more insights, updates, and trends, subscribe hereor enter your email address below.