Cracking The Code on New Customer Acquisition (Supplier Community EXCHANGE! – June 18, 2026)

Every supplier is being asked the same question right now, in line reviews and JBPs and hallway check-ins: where is the new growth coming from?

The easy answers are working less well than they used to: a deeper price drop, a louder retail media buy, one more end cap. Mary Callender, who leads the Walmart Period Care business at Kimberly-Clark, moderates a Supplier Community EXCHANGE! panel that runs the honest version of the acquisition conversation with five people who each sit in a different seat on it: Remy LeCompte (Merchandising Director, Walmart), Rebecca Gammon (Shopper Experience, The Clorox Company), Ashlee Kimbel (Senior Channel Marketing Manager, Samsung), Collin Morgan (Founder, Hip2Save), and Dustin Kuk (Head of Media Sales, InMarket).

LeCompte says the biggest change is accessibility, and that price, search, and features have become table stakes rather than a plan. Kuk puts hard numbers on the noise: the average shopper absorbs thousands of impressions a day and now buys CPG across roughly seven retailers a month, which is why he keeps pulling the room back to incrementality. Kimbel explains why Walmart Connect’s purchase-cycle window makes nearly everyone look like a new buyer in her electronics reporting, and what she does about it. The morning’s sharpest exchange puts Morgan, who describes trust as something a shopper feels, next to Kuk, who says it always shows up in the data. The numbers they cite on daily impressions and cross-retailer shopping, and what it takes to earn a merchant’s belief, are worth hearing in their own words.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• Why the acquisition tactics that worked for years (search, features, rollbacks) are now table stakes, and what a merchant wants above them
• How the shopper’s new access to reviews, nutrition apps, and creator content moved the buying decision earlier than the search bar
• What separates a growth story a Walmart merchant believes from one that gets a polite nod and nothing else
• Why trust now drives first-time trial, and how to carry it into a line review without it sounding like fluff
• How to tell whether a retail media buy is acquiring a new shopper or just harvesting demand that was already coming
• What Scintilla basket, switching, and clustering data can surface that changes the pitch you bring to your buyer
• Why “everyone’s a new buyer” in your reporting may be a measurement artifact, and how to push back for numbers that are real
• How to make your content and item attributes AI-friendly before agents do more of the shopping for your shopper

Rather than treating new customer acquisition as a tactics problem to be solved with a better feature or a bigger media buy, this conversation reframes it as a trust problem: the buying decision gets made before the search bar, and the growth story has to survive both the shopper’s skepticism and the merchant’s.

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