How segmentation is helping the world's largest retail rewards program!

The Middle East is not usually known as a savvy digital market. This is why it was all the more gratifying to hear about how the Landmark Group - that operates more than 2000 outlets across the Middle East, North Africa and the sub-continent - is indulging in some really sophisticated marketing!

Reputed to have the World's Largest Retail Loyalty Program – “Shukran”, with an estimated 15 million members - Landmark wasn't always a sophisticated marketing entity. In fact, as with most conglomerates the data resided in too many silos across the enterprise with hardly any ability to communicate with coherence across the board.

All that changed in 2010, when the Loyalty program was extended throughout the region. Suddenly it was imperative to get a holistic view of the customer. So much so that Loyalty today is a core KPI across business categories. One way Landmark is achieving this 'holistic view of the customer' is by uniting purchasing trends, attitudes and transactional behaviour to create a multi-dimensional segmentation strategy. This is used to not only work out who to offer things to and when, but also what to offer different customers.

Specifically, Landmark’s loyalty team has grouped customers using a range of data identifiers. These include:

• Cultural (environment, subcultures, classes and trends)
• Social (such as community groups, family, role and status)
• Psychological (motivation, perceptions, learnings, attitudes) and
• Personal (demographics, purchasing power, lifestyle and personality).

It’s also attempting to tap into life stage segmentation in order to understand which products and services are most relevant to an individual. In addition, the team is using recency, frequency and monetary spend to categorise members for VIP and Gold status, but equally, to identify and convert the least valuable customers across its member base.

There’s also investment going into ‘headroom segmentation’ – based on purchasing patterns and items a customer has purchased – along with a digital user segmentation matrix that breaks down customers into six segments: Wannabes, mainstreamers, nomads, analogue users, paranoids and chameleons. By looking at which customers fall into each segment, Landmark can start to appeal to them in a relevant channel.

To support these activities, Landmark invested in Oracle’s Responsys platform. This state-of-the-art platform gives the enterprise the ability to plan, define campaigns, conduct A/B testing, continually refine and produce the right kinds of reporting across the enterprise. One current challenge they are facing is mining insightful data from social channels like Facebook. But they have indeed come a long way since the time they started. In fact, the 4P's of marketing have irrevocably changed to the 1R - a long-standing Relationship with customers!