HONG KONG: The effective integration of offline and online data will drive future success for bricks-and-mortar retailers during an ongoing tough period, according to the CEO of dunnhumby, the customer data science company.

“One of the main assets of a retailer in the future will be the data assets at its disposal and the ability of the retailer to exploit those to its advantage,” Guillaume Bacuvier told the World Retail Congress Asia Pacific event in Hong Kong.

“Having an exhaustive cross-channel data set about what customers do is a huge competitive advantage, and very few people have that,” he said. (For more details, read WARC’s report: The future of retail success in Asia is data integration.)

Though effective use of e-commerce data is a hot topic among marketers, Bacuvier emphasized that offline retail data is also critical – after all, physical stores still see the bulk of transactions, especially in Asia. Using that customer data to make marketing communications more personalized is key.

“Are you using your understanding of customers to its full extent to make sure that every touch point you have with a customer is driven by data and data science?

“Move away from mass promotions to personalized promotions making sure that every ad campaign is as personalized as possible,” Bacuvier recommended.

While many retailers have plenty of data about their customers, they may not have the specialist knowledge to make the most of it, he added.

According to Bacuvier, creating a data-centric company culture – including hiring the right specialist talent – is the key to future success.

“You need to have a company that, from bottom to top, is focused on using data to make every single decision – and that is probably the hardest thing to build,” he said.

Sourced from WARC