“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 info@maxxing.com

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

All Rights Reserved © 2011. Maxxing, the

Maxxing logo, Maxxing.com and the

Maxxing Intelligent Promotions Suite are

trademarks of Mapping Group SAS. Other

company, product or service names may

be trademarks or service marks of others.

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.