Loyalty doesn't hold. The moment to win it back does.

A Cannes 2026 panel on CPG retention surfaced a stat that applies well beyond CPG.

At a Cannes 2026 panel on loyalty and retention in CPG marketing, with speakers from Fetch, Brawny, Advil, and Centrum, one reframe cut through the rest: brand loyalty, as most marketers think about it, doesn't hold. Roughly forty percent of a brand's core buyer base turns over every quarter. The category isn't really the point. The mechanism is: loyalty isn't a state a brand keeps, it's a moment that has to be won back, repeatedly, and the data that makes that possible doesn't sit with the brand. It sits with the retailer.

The loyalty reframe: retention is reacquisition

If four in ten of a brand's best customers are gone by next quarter, a loyalty program built to reward people who are already loyal is solving the wrong problem. The real work is catching buyers at the moment they're due to lapse, or just after they have, and giving them a reason to come back. That's not a loyalty program. It's a perpetual reacquisition problem, and whoever holds the retailer's transaction and loyalty data is the one positioned to solve it, for any brand trying to reach that shopper, not just the ones with a CPG label.

RFM is retailer intelligence, not brand intelligence

The panel pointed to recency, frequency, and monetary data, RFM, as the methodology that separates commerce media from traditional targeting. Knowing a buyer is due for a repurchase, rather than guessing based on demographics or browsing behavior, is what turns a media impression into an intercept. That intelligence lives in the retailer's transaction and loyalty data, which is exactly the layer Fluent connects advertisers to, regardless of category. The panel's insight came from CPG marketers, but the infrastructure it depends on is retail media's, not any one brand vertical's.

Loyalty isn't a marketing department's job to do alone

In an interview at Fluent's own event at Cannes, Lee Roth, co-founder of The Actionist, pushed the reframe further. His advice to clients: stop building around the traditional funnel and adopt a moment strategy instead, identify the audience, understand the specific moments that matter to them, and show up in those moments in a way that's culturally right, not just adjacent to the right category. Loyalty fits inside that same logic. Roth's point was direct: loyalty shouldn't be siloed inside a marketing department. It belongs in the broader demand and growth journey of the business, which is exactly where retention data has to live if it's going to catch a buyer at the moment they're about to lapse, not after.

The personalization payoff

One panelist, citing internal research, described a single well-timed, personalized offer to a new buyer as driving meaningfully higher odds of repurchase, enough that a brand doesn't need to keep discounting to retain them. The first intercept, done well, does the work that repeated discounting otherwise has to.

The bottom line

• Roughly forty percent of a CPG brand's core buyers turn over every quarter, a category-specific stat pointing at a category-agnostic truth: loyalty is a cycle to intercept, not a state to maintain.
• RFM methodology is the industry's sophistication signal, and it depends on transaction and loyalty data that lives with the retailer, the same layer Fluent connects advertisers to across categories.
• A well-timed, personalized first offer can meaningfully lift repurchase odds without relying on repeated discounting, according to research cited on the panel.
• Loyalty shouldn't sit siloed in a marketing department. It belongs in the broader demand and growth journey of the business, a point echoed directly in an interview at Fluent's own Cannes event.
• The panel's insight came from CPG marketers. The infrastructure behind it, retailer transaction and loyalty data applied at the right moment, is retail media's, and it's where Fluent already operates.