CASE STUDY
Emart
Driving retail growth through customer data strategy
Challenge
Over the past decade, Emart, the leading general merchandise retailer in South Korea, has been on an aggressive format expansion drive to address competitive and regulatory pressures on its core hypermarket business. As they have expanded into new formats and increased their licensed businesses, they have assembled a diverse portfolio of affiliate companies that fit into consumers’ lives in many ways.
With an over 90 percent penetration rate among South Korean shoppers, Emart was looking to improve current customer relationships and spend across all its affiliate businesses to fuel its next wave of growth. Emart needed to gain a deeper understanding of its customers’ needs and preferences, strengthening its ability to deploy a micro-targeted marketing approach. Emart engaged Prophet to define a comprehensive customer data strategy, as well as the roadmap for transforming their businesses to be more data-driven.
Solutions
Prophet defined a customer data strategy with a detailed roadmap of initiatives to help Emart drive impact across the business.
The Prophet team helped Emart uncover revelatory data that helped define new experiences along the customer journey. Then, Prophet identified the capabilities and organization structure needed to manage, analyze and act on these new data insights. Based on our detailed mapping of Emart’s current state and our knowledge of best practices in leading global organizations, we were able to design a future state model for Emart, as well as the roadmap to build the required capabilities and organizational model.
To demonstrate the value of data and justify future investments, we took a large sample of Emart’s existing transactional and CRM data to identify clear behavioral profiles that could be targeted in pilot marketing experiments. We were able to prove that targeted marketing could have an impact on two levels – increasing spending on the targeted category (e.g. increasing spending on health & beauty), as well as increasing total basket size (e.g. how much they spent on their weekly shop overall).
Results
For a duration of 6 months, Prophet supported the Emart team in conducting a series of test and learn marketing experimentations based on customer data insights with continuous proven success in driving business impact. Since then, Emart has established a dedicated team to run targeted marketing at scale as the full organization at Emart is committed to investing in becoming a data-driven company.
Impact
20%
Increase in sales by non-category
15%
increase in sales by targeting in declining categories
10%
increase in sales in key categories