AMENIA, N.Y. – Major retailers every day are getting more sophisticated in the ways they harness data about their customers, with loyalty programs, credit card accounts and online registrations helping to gather individualized information. While this information is useful for advertising and marketing, there’s also enormous potential for other applications.

“If you think beyond marketing, there are really interesting things that start to become possible, like packaging ideas or product ideas, or distribution strategies – how to get the right things on the right shelves in the right places,” Joanna O’Connell, chief intelligence officer at Omnicom Media Group, said in this interview at the Beet Retreat Berkshires with Beet.TV contributor Rob Williams.

“Business decisions start to unlock when you get closer to the kind of data that these big scale retailers have,” O’Connell said.

Consumer packaged goods brands have an opportunity to gather insights from retailer data that may be helpful in designing …