carrefour success story
DESCRIPTION
Maxxing is a division of Mapping Group which has served the content management and workflow needs of 2,500 worldwide customers for over 22 years. Maxxing’s Intelligent Promotions SuiteTM has planned, designed, executed and refined over 100,000 targeted marketing campaigns from 4,000 retail outlets generating 800-million promotions that have reached over 25-million consumers through a variety of multi-channel distribution methods including in-store devices, mobile applications, location based services, social networks, digital advertising and coupon aggregators.TRANSCRIPT
“Our new model for
managing promotional
campaigns allows us to
get closer to our
customers, gives us
greater control over our
targeted marketing
activities and vastly
improves our overall
organizational
effectiveness.”
- Hervé Thoumyre
Chief Information Officer
Carrefour Group
The Rules of the Game are Changing
As grocery retailers battle for market
share, the competitive landscape is
being altered dramatically. While the
traditional supermarket format
continues to account for the largest
percentage of grocery purchases,
consumers are increasingly turning to
multiple retail formats. Foremost among
these are hypermarkets, whose broad
selection of groceries and general
merchandise provide consumers with
the added benefit of one-stop shopping
as well as low prices. And within both
retail formats, a different kind of shift is
playing out on the shelves. In an effort
to sustain growth, increase margins and
strengthen their brands, grocery
Business Challenge
To maintain its leadership in the
hyper-competitive retail grocery
industry, Carrefour sought to gain
greater control over its marketing
processes with the ultimate aim of
strengthening customer loyalty.
Solution
Carrefour teamed with Maxxing to
implement the Maxxing Intelligent
Promotions SuiteTM which enables
Carrefour to control the planning,
creation, execution and analysis of
all targeted promotions campaigns
across its store formats.
Key Business Benefits
-Improved category pricing and
margins through direct control over
global brand and private label
target marketing initiatives.
-Increased sales, shopping frequency
and basket size with targeted
promotions based on real-time
customer behavior and the ability to
instantly react to store-level trends
as they emerge.
-Facilitated customer insight sharing
and collaboration between trading
partners to plan target promotions
strategies, budgets and campaigns.
Carrefour Strengthens Customer Loyalty and Brand Affinity with
Maxxing Carrefour has grown to become the world’s second largest retailer and operates four
main formats: hypermarkets, supermarkets, discount and convenience stores.
retailers are now offering their own private labels alongside branded
products. The battle for the grocery wallet share is intensifying and the
rules of the game are changing.
A Fresh Look at Promotions
Retail grocery chains realize that to sustain their profitable growth in an
increasingly competitive environment, strengthening customer loyalty is a
strategic priority. To engender maximum satisfaction from its customers,
grocery retailers have traditionally focused on the most visible and highest-
profile elements of the customer experience, from the assortment of
products they stock, to the look, feel and layout of the stores, to the
courtesy of their employees. Equally important to the customer experience,
Marketing Benefits
-Increased frequency in targeted
promotions due to a significant
reduction in the time required from
campaign planning through
execution and analysis.
-Reduced marketing costs by
minimizing dependence upon
expensive and frequently ineffective
marketing agencies, outsourcing
firms, coupon services and
clearinghouses.
-Extended marketing reach through
coordinated, multi-channel
deployments of offers and improved
redemption rates.
Merchandising Benefits
Greater awareness of consumer
trends, behaviors and patterns
resulted in optimal merchandising
strategies that reduced the costs of
inaccurate product assortments,
volume surges, demand uncertainties
and markdowns.
Sourcing Benefits
-Deeper understanding of customer
based analytics and segmentation
created better results in the private
label/global brand merchandise mix
as well as provided a solid basis for
collaborative product design.
Inventory Management Benefits
Targeted promotions at the store
level in response to dynamic events
decreased excess inventory and out-
of-stocks.
Manufacturing Benefits
Improved merchandising insight and
sourcing accuracy minimized spikes
in the manufacturing process,
lowered inventories, required less
direct labor and facilitated better raw
material negotiations.
though less visible, is the value customers derive from their relationship
with the retailer through promotional activities such as points-based
loyalty programs and targeted couponing. However, while promotional
practices are well-established, the reliance on third-party service providers
to administer these marketing programs has made it difficult for retailers
to apply them with any real precision, react real-time to buying behaviors,
trends and events, measure marketing effectiveness and share customer
insight with trading partners. That is because this traditional solution
provider model keeps retailers far removed from the information they
need to benefit from targeted promotions.
Carrefour (www.carrefour.com), the world’s second-largest retailer, saw
the opportunity to enhance its business performance and become an even
stronger competitor by embracing a new promotional standard. Carrefour
recognized the importance of customer loyalty to its future growth and
how leveraging the strength of the Carrefour brand across its supermarket,
hypermarket and convenience stores would help to achieve a competitive
advantage by creating a common customer experience. As part of this
strategy, Carrefour sought to enable smarter, more effective and more
personalized promotions and coupons that, instead of being unique to a
particular Carrefour store format, would span them all, thus enhancing
loyalty to the Carrefour brand across all stores. Achieving this would
require Carrefour to redefine its processes, leverage information as a
strategic asset and transform its existing systems without disrupting in-
store operations. It saw Maxxing, whose parents company Mapping has a
well-established track record serving over 5,000 worldwide customers of all
sizes with enterprise content management and workflow solutions, as the
organization with the greatest expertise and best qualifications to help
Carrefour reach this vision.
The Maxxing Intelligent Promotions SuiteTM
Carrefour required a solution where loyalty sales and profitability could be
enhanced by intelligent promotional offers that reflect each consumers
individual purchasing patterns. One of Carrefour’s most important
requirements was adaptability, both in terms of the system’s ability to
configure highly tailored offers for specific customer segments and in its
ability to integrate with existing IT infrastructure. Maxxing integrated the
Intelligent Promotions SuiteTM into Carrefour’s core retail systems, from
point-of-sale terminals to back-office systems and all points in between. On
top of this infrastructure, Maxxing defined a new process flow that
leverages real-time business intelligence to create more effective, dynamic
and profitable promotion programs. In addition to enabling smarter
programs, the solution delivers a quantum increase in the degree of
flexibility and control Carrefour can exercise in creating, monitoring,
managing and analyzing these programs. The seamless quality of the
Maxxing solution makes this possible and enables Carrefour to develop a
deeper understanding of and relationship with its customer base.
Carrefour took full control of its end-to-end
couponing and promotion systems. By relying on
its own business intelligence and analytics instead
of third parties, Carrefour can craft highly targeted
campaigns, execute them more rapidly and gauge
their impact instantaneously. This new model also
provides more direct support for Carrefour’s
efforts to strengthen customer loyalty by creating
a common customer experience across all of its
retail formats.
Opportunity through Greater Insight
By tracking transaction history, Carrefour can leverage its in-house
analytics capability to determine not only which products customers buy,
but also to which promotions they are most likely to respond. From this
information, Carrefour’s marketers can further glean insights such as: who
are its most profitable customers; what products they purchased; and,
perhaps most importantly, what products would they likely be willing to
buy if the incentive was right. A good example is a customer segment that
may purchase organic food products, but has yet to try organic health and
beauty aids. Maxxing’s Intelligent Promotions SuiteTM enables company
marketers to craft a highly-sophisticated and targeted promotional
program to incentivize this subset of customers to try this or any other mix
of products.
But in the big picture, it is campaign execution capabilities that make the
Maxxing solution truly stand out as first of its kind. It isn’t just that
Carrefour is the first grocery retailer to perform its own targeted
promotions and couponing; it’s also the unprecedented agility that
Maxxing gives Carrefour in executing promotional campaigns within
individual store locations. When Carrefour wants to promote, for example,
a certain brand of soft drink to a particular segment of customers (based
on their history of purchasing specific products), available promotional
tools include coupons for current use, coupons for use in later
transactions, and point-based incentives related to its loyalty program.
Once Carrefour’s marketers determine the optimal mix to achieve the
desired goal, these rules are defined in the Maxxing Intelligent Promotions
SuiteTM and then propagated out to each of Carrefour’s stores where the
software automatically orchestrates the presentation of offers on a
customer-by-customer basis. Triggered by the customer’s purchases and
the scanning of the loyalty card during the checkout process, Maxxing first
applies its rules to determine which offers are available to the customer,
then queries Carrefour’s customer loyalty application to determine point
balances. Combining and processing this information, the Maxxing
solution then determines the optimal incentive and sends it back to POS
terminals at the check-out counter. Maxxing then fulfills the offer by
printing the coupon, issuing the discount and/or updating the customer’s
loyalty account, as well as automatically redeeming and reconciling the
offer. The entire process takes less than 1 second to complete. Maxxing’s
ability to coordinate and deploy intelligent promotions through kiosks,
mobile phones, Web sites, and hand-held devices attests to the flexibility
of its architecture.
Taking Control
With the Maxxing’s Intelligent Promotions SuiteTM deployed across its
French, Chinese, Taiwan, Turkey and soon Middle East stores, Carrefour
gained control over and dramatically improved the effectiveness of its
marketing capabilities. Operational efficiency is another result, evidenced
33,000 point of sale terminals connected worldwide.
20 million cardholders and 6 million coupons issued per day in France.
400 active campaigns and 2 million coupons issued per day in China.
3 month implementation with a payback period of around 1.5 years.
“With the Maxxing Intelligent
Promotion’s SuiteTM, we have a
unique opportunity to be both
customer and product-centric in
the way we manage our
targeted marketing campaigns
across our different store
formats throughout the world.”
Gérard Castrie
Chief Marketing Officer
Carrefour France
by the significant reduction in time required from campaign planning to
execution, which in turn enables Carrefour to undertake more frequent
targeted marketing campaigns. This is reinforced by Carrefour’s ability to
monitor the effectiveness of its programs almost instantaneously and
share detailed critical data, performance results and analysis with its
trading partners. Most importantly, notes CIO Hervé Thoumyre, the new
capabilities enable Carrefour to create a common experience across all of
its stores that strengthens the company’s brand and the loyalty of its
customers. “Our new model for managing promotional campaigns allows
us to get closer to our customers, gives us greater control over our
targeted marketing activities and vastly improves our overall
organizational effectiveness.” says Hervé Thoumyre. “We see the success
of our retail grocery solution as a testament to Maxxing’s vision, industry
expertise and thought leadership.”
For more information:
Please email [email protected]
Visit us at www.maxxing.com
About Maxxing
Maxxing is a division of Mapping Group which has served the content management and workflow needs of 2,500 worldwide customers for over 22 years. Maxxing’s Real Time Intelligent PromotionsTM has planned, designed, executed and refined over 100,000 targeted marketing campaigns from 4,000 retail outlets generating 800-million promotions that have reached over 25-million consumers through a variety of multi-channel distribution methods including in-store devices, mobile applications, location based services, social networks, digital advertising and coupon aggregators.
Maxxing, Inc.
1501 Broadway, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10036
+1 646-571-2077
www.maxxing.com
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Maxxing logo, Maxxing.com and the
Maxxing Intelligent Promotions Suite are
trademarks of Mapping Group SAS. Other
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This case study illustrates how one
Maxxing customer uses Maxxing products.
There is no guarantee of comparable
results. References in this publication to
Maxxing products or services do not imply
that Maxxing intends to make them
available in all countries in which Maxxing
operates.