If you think about data monetization, this idea that retailers can take and anonymize their data and sell it to financial services companies, to retailers in other geographies, etc. But this idea that you are able to take what's really your own first party-data, and we're in an environment where that has a different kind of value. I think from a retailer perspective, it's an entirely new source of income and will allow you to invest in other solutions. You're not just a box selling product that's going out the front door.
You are now a fully digitally-enabled company and being able to monetize that in a different way. You can maybe, probably do more with your margins. And you can do more for the consumer. Gamification, engagement, because you're funding it in a way that you haven't before.
It can be a completely separate revenue stream. You can put some that back into your experience of the consumer. You can have it all flow to the bottom line. But this, to me, is actually a game-changer when it comes to who is a retailer?
Where do they sit in terms of their multiples? From data monetization, do we give them two or three more multiple points? Absolutely. Right?
And so thereby, you start to have different investors looking at them and as they become more digitally enabled. Yeah, they're probably becoming they look much more like a technology company, than they have in the past. And as a result, I think they get a higher valuation, which allows them to do all kinds of things. So we're not just using the word data monetization or the thought process.
It's this contextualization of the data that you're selling to others so they can better understand the consumer, they can better understand what's happening in retail, and as a result, they can either offer a better services, products or experiences than they could otherwise. This idea that you have this entirely new revenue source than when you built your boxes, when you built your long-term plan, that was never a part of it. This really opens the doors for so many things. And we think about cost of customer acquisition...
This is one of the reasons that we're seeing this huge change in terms of how people are thinking about physical. Because acquiring a customer online now is so expensive that we're seeing this move towards more physical stores. And I believe that this focus around this like monetization, this data, we're going to continue to see some real changes. And we're just getting started.
