On 12th July 2017, China Resources Vanguard (CRV), the leading retailer in Chinese market, and dunnhumby, a world-class customer data science company, announced a 50-50 joint venture partnership, aiming to bring an unparalleled standard of data analytics through a holistic combination of online and offline customer data. The partnership would help China retailers and CPG clients unlock the value of being truly customer-centric and yield market success, which was also the initial organizational value which China wisdom dunnhumby and the partnership between CRV and dunnhumby have been established on.
Five principal business areas for China wisdom dunnhumby
Retail service: Applies its 30-year expertise to making CRV’s retail businesses more customer-centric, helping CRV to use its own data to better understand, segment and engage with customers – which consequently improving the shopping experience across more than 3,000 retail outlets across China.
CPG service: Provides comprehensive customer insight services to the CPG market. By guarantee exclusive rights to access unparalleled insight into the shopping behaviors of 40 million Chinese customers of CRV, dunnhumby offers a suite of data-driven solutions and consultancy services to CPG companies, helping them improve their assortment, customer understanding and communications online, offline and in-store.
Media: the media sector of dunnhumby, with a programmatic advertising division, harnesses third-party data sources to improve customers’ experiences and responses to online, social and mobile marketing communications, which in turn increases ROI of marketing investment.
Data governance: Provides other Chinese businesses across multiple sectors with market-leading data analysis and insight services. Dunnhumby is able to support a wide range of consumer-oriented businesses that are looking to harness their data to better understand, engage and reward customers.
Big-data research & development capability: Focuses on creating new tools, capabilities and algorithms to uniquely capture the needs of the Chinese big-data market.
Achievement in those two years:
Retail service: a yearly workplan was confirmed at the beginning of a year and being tracked across the year. The plan, which included Customer insight/DM & Promotion optimization/Target marketing/Price/Festival analysis/Category management/Store diagnosis and training for CRV user, helped CRV improve the promotion efficiency. For example, the DM sales contribution rose up to 20% from 18% in LY, and strong promotion rate increased from 19% to 22% based on DM toolkit optimization. On festival target marketing event, spend per visit and visits got more than 3% growth comparing with control groups.
CPG service: the customer data insight has propelled CRV to work with key CPG clients and set up annual revenue objectives to achieve JBP target. Shop on LabTM, A market-leading insight tools powered by best-in-class science and granular data from nearly one billion shoppers across the globe, had been launched for Chinese clients in June 2019. It helped MDLZ/Mars/Hankel to use it to improve the Customer experience and grow sales in CRV. As a strong advocate of China Wisdom dunnhumby, CRV also gave full support to JV’s commercial business to induct dunnhumby data science in CPG clients and prospects.
Media: Annual Media Plan and ad-hoc Target Commutations projects with CRV have landed key CPG clients such as Abbott, Friso, Unilever, P&G, Yili Group. Our cooperation with Tencent has taken good shape as we have started to use integrated data for O2O target advertising and promotion from our clients such as L'Oréal, Mars Wrigley, P&G who all speak highly of our service. Among the projects, the P&G O2O one got most recognition and has won the award of retail innovation given by CCFA - 22% coupon redemption rate which is 5 times that of FMCG industry average. The positive business impact we've made for our clients have attracted eyeballs from more CPGs who have initiated negotiations with us to create Annual Media Planning from a long-term partnership perspective.
Data governance: with help and support from IT department of CRV, China wisdom dunnhumby has managed more than 60TB of data in the Shanwei data center. We implemented web-based data insight platform SHOP on LabTM and product assortment optimization tools Shelf Review successfully. Those tools are powered by world-leading customer data science of dunnhumby and adjusted based on localization requirement.
Big-data research & development: based on needs of local market and integrated with dunnhumby's global development and local engineering capabilities, China wisdom dunnhumby has landed on three different tools in JV-owns. CKPI (KPI platform)/DM toolkit (DM optimization tools)/MAT (marketing automation tools).
Significance for development of consumer business in CR group:
Better insights to drive consumer satisfaction, although there are continuous innovation models in the retail and FMCG(fast-moving-customer-goods) industry, but the essence of business is still whether products and services can effectively meet the needs of consumers. China Wisdom dunnhumby can provide continuous service for consumer insight deep-dive in consumer business of CR group.
Data monetization, based on the understanding from shopping behaviors of 40 million Chinese customers of CRV and rules of GDPR, applied the data insight to retail or other industries like bank/pharmacy/shop mall dunnhumby already served in global market. Finally, built own JV IP product based on needs of China market.
Deep integration in CRM. Clubcard members are the core foundation of the entire industry ecosystem. Through the integration of resources and the optimization of business models, China Wisdom dunnhumby can support the integration of operations within the China Resources system to enhance the competitiveness of the entire consumer segment.
Last but not least, China wisdom dunnhumby’s business has faced many challenges to get this far and will be confronted with many more in the future. Our success today and in the future would not have been possible without the unflagging support from CRV leadership team and dunnhumby global. A huge thank-you to everyone who has given full devotion to China JV business without hesitating to contribute above and beyond. It's an adventurous journey we've set our foot on that will never be easy but rewarding to be always remembered.
