The L’Oreal KAM left a slide deck on your desk. The next JBP is in six weeks.

If you run commercial at a Malaysian pharmacy chain, you may have already had this meeting. If you have not, you will in the next two quarters.

Your L’Oreal Key Account Manager (KAM) comes in for the quarterly review. She brings a deck her global team built. The deck shows what L’Oreal got from Boots in the UK on a single skincare launch: the named members who bought, their repeat purchase rate at 90 days, the basket lift on the launch SKU, and L’Oreal’s share of category at member level, broken out by postcode.

Then she asks, politely, what your chain delivered for L’Oreal’s last campaign. You have gross rating points (GRPs), end-cap days, and a sales lift number for the campaign window. She does not say anything. Your next Joint Business Plan (JBP) with L’Oreal is in six weeks. I think I know what is happening.

L’Oreal stopped buying shelf space from you, and started buying proof from your competitors.

In the last four years, L’Oreal, Unilever, Reckitt and the rest of the global supplier base have quietly moved a meaningful share of their trade-marketing budget out of reach-and-frequency media and into retailer-owned media networks. The destination is the same in every market.

In the UK they pay Tesco. In the US they pay Walmart and Kroger. In Australia, since 10 November 2025, they pay Priceline Pharmacy, which now sells targeted campaigns to its 9.5 million Sister Club members through Zitcha.

Tesco Media and Insight reported over £100 million in supplier-funded advertising revenue in 2024. Boots, owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance, runs the same model in UK pharmacy. It is a high-margin revenue line that did not exist a decade ago.

The L’Oreal Malaysia KAM reports into a global supplier team that has already standardised on this model in every market that supports it. She is not freelancing. She is asking you for what her global counterparts already get from Boots, Tesco, and now Priceline.

The question is no longer whether retail media reaches Malaysian pharmacy. It is which chain ships it first, and which suppliers move their JBP money there.

“Your loyalty members are not a marketing cost. They are the only asset that lets you bill L’Oreal for proof instead of for reach. The chain that ships that first captures the supplier budgets the others will lose.”

Your chain already owns the members. Nobody has built the data layer that turns them into a media channel L’Oreal will pay for.

Watsons Club crossed 8 million members at its fifteenth anniversary in 2025. MYguardian Rewards crossed 5 million members in April 2026, thirteen months after launch. BIG Caring Group, with 626 outlets, filed for a Bursa Malaysia listing in April and targets an IPO of up to RM3 billion by October 2026.

Your chain already owns the members. The data layer underneath them does not yet exist. In most Malaysian pharmacy chains today, loyalty data sits in one system, POS data in another, and a Friday afternoon export from the analytics team produces the supplier-campaign performance report by hand. None of it was built to produce the report L’Oreal’s KAM is asking for.

The good news is that it does not need to be rebuilt to start billing for the first member-level campaign. It needs three numbers, and the data join that produces them, before your next supplier meeting.

What to put in front of L’Oreal in six weeks

Each one is the difference between selling shelf space and selling a media channel.

01 · Identified buyers, not impressions

For L’Oreal’s last campaign with your chain, how many of your loyalty members bought the promoted product within 30 days?

Boots reports this in absolute numbers of named members, not raw transactions, and as a percentage of the segment the campaign targeted. If your team can only produce a campaign-window sales lift, you are selling shelf space at the price of shelf space, not media at the price of media.

02 · New-to-brand buyers

Of those identified buyers, how many bought a L’Oreal product from you for the first time in twelve months?

This is the number a brand manager values most, because it is the proof her marketing budget is buying real new demand, not loyal repeat buyers who would have purchased anyway. In a JBP, this single percentage moves the negotiation more than any other line on the deck. Most pharmacy chains in this market cannot produce it.

03 · 90-day repeat purchase

Of the new-to-brand buyers in number two, how many bought L’Oreal again within 90 days?

This is the number that justifies a higher cost per thousand impressions (CPM) next year. It separates a one-off promotion bump from a real customer L’Oreal acquired through your chain. Boots reports this number per launch. If you bring it to your JBP, you are no longer competing on listing fees and gondola rent. You are negotiating media rates against proven behaviour.

One thing you can do on Monday

Producing those three numbers properly takes the data team about two weeks, because they sit across loyalty, POS, and supplier-campaign records. But there is one thing you can do on Monday morning that tells you whether the data is reachable at all.

Pull the last supplier-funded campaign you ran with L’Oreal. Find out who in your team holds the list of members the campaign targeted (the segment your team pushed via app, email, or in-store flag) and the list of transactions of the promoted SKU during the campaign window. If the same person owns both lists, the join is one afternoon of work. If those two lists are in two different teams that have never spoken, that is the gap to close before the JBP.

Thanks for reading this far. If the one thing on Monday gives you a number to bring into your next supplier meeting, this email earned its space.