If I run marketing at a Malaysian grocer, here is the question I cannot answer yet.

If you run marketing at a Malaysian grocery chain, you have already had this thought. If you have not, you will in the next two quarters.

I open my loyalty dashboard on Monday morning. I see five million sign-ups. I see app downloads, daily active users, redemption rates, points balances. My team built every chart on the screen.

I cannot find the one number I actually need: of my members who saw last month’s Unilever campaign on my app, how many walked into my store and bought the product within thirty days. The data exists. The chart does not.

Two weeks later, my CEO asks me how we should respond to the price war. Lotus’s sells 30 eggs for RM9.49. Madani Mart opens 640 outlets. My CEO wants a plan.

I cannot tell him whether we win that war or whether we should be fighting it at all. I think I know what is happening.

My suppliers stopped paying me for shelf space. They started paying someone else for the names of my customers.

For the last decade, the FMCG companies I deal with daily, Unilever, Nestlé, L’Oreal, P&G, have moved their trade-marketing budgets out of television and print and into retailer-owned ad networks. The buyer wants one specific thing: a report that names the customers who bought their product.

In the UK, that report comes from Tesco. In Australia, from Coles and Woolworths. In Malaysia today, that report does not come from me.

In April 2024, Grab announced its O2O integration with Jaya Grocer. The deal opened GrabAds campaigns to FMCG brands selling under the supermarket chain (Marketing-Interactive, MARKETECH APAC, April 2024).

In the same announcement, Grab named one brand case study: The Laughing Cow, owned by Bel Group. Grab states the brand “successfully attributed the majority of its offline sales at Jaya Grocer to its online awareness campaign on GrabAds.”

In plain English: a cheese brand can now prove which of its in-store sales at Jaya Grocer came from a Grab ad. The grocer cannot prove the same on its own shelves.

Tesco built this model first. In 2010, Tesco took full ownership of Dunnhumby, the data company behind Clubcard (Wikipedia/Dunnhumby, diginomica).

Today, 24 million UK households carry a Clubcard, in a country of 28 million (Dunnhumby Upfront 2026). 82% of Tesco’s UK sales now run through a Clubcard (eMarketer, June 2026).

The ad business Tesco built on top of that data helped push first-half 2024 profit to £1.56 billion (BBC, Grocery Doppio).

The Unilever, Nestlé, and L’Oreal account managers I meet every quarter report into regional teams in Singapore. Those regional teams already see Tesco-style reports from the UK, Australia, and Thailand. Their global brand managers in London and Geneva sign annual plans against those numbers.

Grab can now produce that report for Jaya Grocer sales. I cannot produce it for sales in my own stores. My next supplier review will land differently because of that.

The question is no longer whether retail media reaches Malaysian grocery. The question is which suppliers move their campaign budget there.

“Tesco bought the data company that runs their loyalty programme. Jaya Grocer was bought by the platform that runs theirs.”

My loyalty dashboard tracks sign-ups and redemptions. It does not tell me which of my members my campaigns actually moved.

My chain looks busy on every dashboard I open. 99 Speedmart did RM3.04 billion in revenue in third quarter FY2025 across 3,037 outlets, at an average basket of RM21.40 (The Edge Malaysia, November 2025).

AEON BIG runs 22 hypermarkets, Mydin 69 stores (Marketing-Interactive, 2024). Lotus’s runs My Lotus’s across roughly 60 hypermarkets.

My transaction volume is not the problem. The problem is how few of those baskets carry a name I own.

In most of the chains I know, loyalty data sits in one system and till data sits in another. My analytics team produces the supplier-campaign report by hand on a Friday afternoon.

Two chains have handed the customer relationship to outside vendors entirely. AEON BIG made Retail Media Network (RMN) the exclusive in-store ad partner across 22 hypermarkets in 2024. Mydin signed the same vendor across 69 stores (Marketing-Interactive).

Jaya Grocer’s first-ever loyalty programme launched in March 2023 already running on GrabRewards. Their members earn into the Grab app, not a Jaya Grocer app (TNGlobal, RinggitPlus, March 2023).

One chain is building it in-house. AEON Co and AEON Credit launched AEON360 in August 2025, targeting 10 million members in five years. In April 2026, they signed a Google Cloud deal to put the AEON customer database on BigQuery (The Edge Malaysia, Google Cloud, April 2026).

The data my suppliers want already exists inside my business. Producing the report they ask for does not require a new loyalty platform. It needs three numbers I should already know about my own members, and the data join that produces them, before my next planning cycle.

2 questions I can ask my own data this week

Each one separates a marketing team that runs campaigns from a marketing team that runs a measurable customer base.

01 · Sales attached to a known member

What percentage of my chain’s sales last quarter sat attached to a known member in my own database?

Tesco’s number is 82% (eMarketer, June 2026). Most Malaysian grocers I have spoken to sit below 30%.

If my number is below 30%, my suppliers pay me for shelves, not for campaigns. If it is above 50%, I have a base my suppliers will fund campaigns against once they trust my reporting.

02 · Members my campaigns actually moved

For my last supplier-funded campaign, how many named members bought the promoted product within 30 days?

This is the number GrabAds already produces for Jaya Grocer sales (Grab + Jaya Grocer, April 2024). Tesco Media and Insight has produced it for Tesco since 2017 (Marketing Week).

If my team only reports the campaign-window sales lift, I am selling my supplier a shelf. If my team can report how many of my members converted, I am selling my supplier a measurable campaign.

One thing I can do on Monday morning

Producing the three numbers properly will take my data team about two weeks, because the data sits across loyalty, point-of-sale, and supplier-campaign records. There is one thing I can do on Monday morning that tells me whether the data is even reachable.

I pull up the last supplier-funded campaign my team ran. I find the person who holds the list of members the campaign targeted, the segment my team pushed via app, email, SMS, or in-store flag.

Then I find the person who holds the till receipts for the promoted product during the campaign window.

If the same person owns both lists, the join takes one afternoon. If those two lists sit in two teams that have never spoken, that is the gap I need to close before my next planning cycle.

Thanks for reading this far. If the one thing on Monday gives me a number to bring into my next planning cycle, this email earned its space.