One of the biggest challenges for product brands today is simple: knowing who their customers are.

This is especially true for brands that sell through unaffiliated retail stores, marketplaces or third-party sellers. In these cases, the brand often never interacts directly with the customer. While a product may be sold, the relationship ends at check out - unless the brand takes proactive steps to reconnect with the buyer.

But without knowing who your product owners are or what they’ve purchased, there’s no way to offer personalized service, anticipate needs or build brand loyalty. That’s why identifying your customers and the products they own is the first and most important step in any customer engagement strategy.

What is the Ownership Experience (OX)?
The full journey a customer has with your brand and product—from the moment of purchase through the entire life of product ownership.

Why Identification Is So Important

Many brands focus on getting the sale, either direct or through a third-party retailer. But real engagement starts after the purchase. That’s when customers start forming deeper opinions about your brand—based on onboarding, product performance, support and communication.

By capturing customer and product data early on, you unlock the ability to:

• Deliver personalized support and how-to content
• Offer relevant product recommendations and promotions
• Simplify warranty claims and service requests
• Turn one-time buyers into loyal brand advocates

Key Moments to Gather Ownership Data

Since retail channels don’t always share buyer information, it’s crucial to take advantage of early, direct touchpoints. These “moments of truth” are ideal times to collect data:

• Product registration (online or through QR codes)
• Warranty activation
• Mobile app sign-up or product pairing
• Customer support inquiries
• Post-purchase surveys

What to Collect

Start small and scale up. You don’t need every detail to begin building a relationship, but some core information includes:

• Customer name and contact information
• Product details: model, serial number (if applicable), date of purchase
• Where the product was purchased
• Optional: interests and future intent

The more complete your data, the more effectively you can support customers and personalize their experience. And the more customers you identify, the greater your return on customer engagement efforts.

At Registria, we help brands turn disconnected sales into connected relationships. Our OXM platform makes it easy to collect, manage and act on ownership data—no matter where your product is sold.

This is the first of four framework blogs part of our Customer Engagement Blog Series, which will be followed by strategies to improve customer engagement for product brands. We will explore three more framework pillars to create a logical structure for a deeper understanding of the post-purchase customer relationship with product brands, then we will tackle how to put the pillars into action!