Being a leader in the retail marketing space today is both challenging and exciting. It requires marketers to build strong relationships with today’s demanding, diverse and uber-connected customers and continually motivate them to choose your brand and products over others.

So how can retail marketers find success in today’s difficult environment? Marissa Jarratt, executive vice president, chief marketing and sustainability officer at 7-Eleven, offered three key leadership insights during her session at the 2024 National Retail Federation Big Show in New York earlier this week. The session was moderated by Lauren Weiner, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group.

1. Know Your What

More than ever before, retail marketers “Need to know the exact problem they are trying to solve and what innovation to implement to help solve that problem,” Jarratt said. A good example of matching a problem to an innovative solution is 7-Eleven’s ICE program, an integrated suite of data-driven insights led by its Gulp Media retail media network, the first to serve the convenience store industry. The network leverages first-party data to help fulfill immediate consumption purchase occasions in a more targeted fashion — something the retailer has been trying to do more effectively. With this program, “We can enable more successful innovation  in our stores for both of our manufacturing partners as well as our proprietary customers,” Jarratt said.

2. Be Customer Obsessed

“The No. 1 thing we have to know is what our customers want and need — even if they can’t articulate it,” Jarratt said. One way  7-Eleven deepens its understanding of what its customers want is through its C-Shopper analytics platform, Brainfreeze Collective, a proprietary research panel of 250,000 customers and forthcoming 7-Eleven Lab stores, Jarratt said. “We like to play this game with the Brainfreeze Collective where we try to predict how a customer is going to answer a question, and we found that we’re wrong half of the time,” she added. “I think this reinforces the fact that since we are not exactly the target, we need to be open-minded, seek to understand, and listen to what our customers are saying, and then take action on those learnings.”

3. Practice Agile Collaboration

“Today’s pace — in retail, culture, customers, data, and technology — is not slowing down, so we have to ask ourselves, ‘How can we overcome some perennial problems by working together better?’“ Jarratt asked. “I think it has to has to start with trust, clarity and visibility of what we are trying to achieve, and an understanding of how we can all work together to go after that. Being able to easily pivot and practice agile collaboration is needed now more than ever.”