Every marketer is balancing priorities: a loyalty program, a credit card, co-marketing deals, all competing for the same few seconds of a customer’s attention. Get that mix wrong, and it reads as clutter, but get it right, and it looks like the free tailgate setup Lowe’s built with Live Nation, the kind of perk a family talks about the next morning.
That was the topic of discussion at Brand Innovators’ Future of Retail & Commerce Summit, where Sabrina Karr, Senior Director at Live Nation, and Laura Cosgrove, SVP of Retail Partnerships at Rokt, moderated by Melissa Saunders, Director of Marketing, Strategic Partnerships at Lowe’s, for a panel called What Consumers Want Next: From Transactions to Connected Experiences.
Their answer came down to one idea: know which offer to show each customer, and know when to show nothing at all.
From convenience to relevance
"We've moved from a world of expectations of speed and convenience… to relevance," Sabrina said. A few years ago, a fast checkout was the whole game. Now brands have to craft offers that reflect what each customer actually wants. Sabrina pointed to a fashion icon planning an outfit for weeks, a parent managing parking and two overtired kids, and a group of friends choosing a tour date because it doubles as a trip. Same ticket, different reason for buying it, so the offer around that ticket has to reflect it.
Relevance you can actually see
For Lowe's and Live Nation, relevance looks like The Tailgate, a new multi-year partnership centered on a free pregame space at select amphitheaters, with food, games, and shaded seating, plus exclusive perks for MyLowe's Rewards members. Melissa described watching fans use it start to finish, arriving hours early, staying through the pregame, then coming right back to the same spot after the show.
For Rokt, Laura said, relevance looks like reading the signal already sitting inside a transaction. Rokt acts as a data orchestration layer, picking up on details like a New York billing address paired with tickets to a Los Angeles show, and using that to decide which offer is most relevant in the moment, without either brand handing over its customer data.
When the best offer is no offer
Laura was direct about avoiding customer frustration by recognizing when to show nothing at all. Her example: a retailer wanted to show its store credit card to every shopper at checkout. "If someone is not creditworthy, you should not be putting the credit card in front of them," she said, "because if they go and apply and ultimately get declined, that's a terrible customer experience." Sometimes, the right call is to show nothing at all.
Sabrina described the same discipline at Live Nation. The Spotify Reserve program invites fans to a presale based on their own listening history, not a blanket announcement to everyone. "We're waiting for the show you care about most before you're invited," she said. "We're trying to give you an offer when it's something you're a true fan of, rather than a bunch of offers that aren't relevant."
Laura put the whole idea in one line: brands love sorting customers into loyalist, discoverer, deal-seeker buckets, but real people rarely fit cleanly into any of them. "We need to start figuring out how we're going to serve each individual on that one-to-one level," she said.
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