Mars Taps Item-Level Receipt Data with Loyalty Partnership

In an effort to better understand how consumers are buying its products, candymaker Mars has announced a new partnership with consumer rewards app Fetch to offer points for purchasing the company’s products when shoppers send in a picture of their receipts.

Through the initiative, Mars can gain a range of insights into how consumers shop for its products — what times of day they usually make their purchases, what other kinds of products they typically buy in the same transaction and so on. In turn, the brand can more effectively market its products. Consumers, for their part, can use their points for Fetch rewards such as gift cards.

“With this relationship, we’ll be providing Mars with the best-in-class insights, activations, and measurement capabilities that will push their business to the next level while also providing an easy way for consumers to save on their favorite brands,” Patrick Burke, Fetch’s chief revenue officer, said in a statement.

Many kinds of businesses are looking to gain access to consumers’ receipts. Research from PYMNTS’ study. “Tapping Into The Benefits Of Item-Level Receipt Data,” created in collaboration with Banyan, which draws from a survey of 351 executives at financial institutions and FinTechs, notes that 61% are at least somewhat interested in using receipt data for loyalty and shopping offers.

Get the study: Tapping Into The Benefits Of Item-Level Receipt Data

“In a world where you can pay for something using your watch, we’re still getting a paper receipt to mark the end of the transaction,” Tash Grossman, CEO and founder of digital receipts app Slip, told PYMNTS in an April interview. “That’s just mind blowing to me.”

Additionally, in a June 2021 interview with PYMNTS,  Lee Kennedy, then-senior vice president of product management at Ethoca explained that digital receipts are more than just taking the paper readouts and putting them into an electronic format. They could include instruction manuals, promotions or loyalty programs embedded within them to increase engagement with consumers.

“The digital receipt becomes a gateway into the interaction with that merchant, and about everything related to that purchase and potentially future interactions,” said Kennedy. “There are all kinds of new engagement opportunities that add value as a merchant and as an issuer, which adds value in terms of your customer retention.”

Moreover, by providing Mars access to receipt data, the partnership also helps limit the brand’s dependence on retailers and digital marketplaces for consumer data. With grocers such as Amazon Fresh and Kroger and aggregators including Instacart and DoorDash having made moves in recent years to sell their data to brands, the Fetch partnership enables Mars to circumvent the middleman and gain access to their own buying data.

That being said, the data is of course skewed, coming from the limited subset of consumers who would go out of their way to send in their receipts for rewards, suggesting that the company will likely still need these indirect data sets to remain competitive.