Challenge for Lacoste
Lacoste, a renowned ready-to-wear brand, sells iconic men’s and women’s garments via a dense network of retail stores and a growing e-commerce presence. When researching ways to optimise their marketing actions, Lacoste’s Customer Engagement teams asked Artefact to audit their Data Management Platform, a key tool for orchestrating digital marketing campaigns.
A DMP collects, stores, and organises data, making data easy to access and use for customer segmentation, and facilitating exposure to marketing activation tools.
This audit helped Lacoste meet two objectives: improve their digital activation performance through innovative use cases, and control their data to foster their customer relationship personalisation strategy.
To help Lacoste, we needed to:
Optimise their advertising segmentation and targeting tool to increase efficiency and seek additional sales.
Gain visibility and control in all collection, segmentation, and data exposure activities.
Solution for Lacoste
Once the audit was completed, Artefact recommended the adoption of an in-house solution based on Google Cloud (GCP) infrastructure. We helped Lacoste’s teams implement the new environment which enabled them to connect all their data sources and activation tools.
1. Creation of new data architecture based on use cases
One of Lacoste’s strategic challenges was to reconcile the customer journey between physical sales points and e-commerce sites. The core of the Artefact project focused on connecting Lacoste data from multiple sources: transactional (offline and online); behavioural (from media interactions); on-site and email; and declarative socio-demographic (using Cegid CBR/Y2, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, GA 360 and Cheetah analytics tools, respectively).
Next, individual Lacoste customer journeys were reconciled to enable implementation of value activation use cases, while respecting the cross-channel behaviours of these customers.
All of these services were developed on the Google Cloud Platform, using and adapting the platform’s different components to meet Lacoste’s data collecting, processing, and exposure needs.
The first phase of the project consisted of four use cases focused on email and media activations:
These first pilots were voluntarily restricted to use cases previously tested by Lacoste to have a performance comparison window with their preceding tools.
2. Team reorganisation and training to internalise DMP management
To position this new tool at the heart of Lacoste’s digital transformation, we proposed and implemented a new organisation, including nominating business and technical Product Owners responsible for two things: launching innovative activation use cases supported by DMPand ensuring the technical evolution of GCP services used to meet the needs of these use cases.
By reinforcing their internal data expertise, Lacoste was able to capitalise on their new DMP tool and obtain an extremely granular vision of their customer data, without relying on a third-party editor.
3. New perspectives to explore
In 2020, our work continues with Lacoste. New, more elaborate use cases are under construction to increment from the first results. The project is now in scale phase, with a geographical extension of DMP use cases, currently deployed in three countries. The tool should be active in all European countries in 2020, replicating the use cases piloted in Paris, while integrating variables specific to each market.
Today, the new DMP tool is focused on customer engagement, particularly through CRM and media, but its functions and the collected data will allow us to consider use cases based on other components of the retail value chain: identification of trends, sales forecasts, stock shortage prevention. This first initiative for data centralisation opens new horizons to explore for Lacoste.
Artefact’s accompaniment also continues by integrating two business subjects critical for Lacoste. Our consultants are examining ways to personalise the customer journey on the site according to purchase history, socio-demographic criteria, etc. As for emailing, to reach dormant customers in the CRM base, they’re planning to reactivate them through media.
Results for Lacoste
The first phase of the project enabled Lacoste to reappropriate its data while upskilling its teams.
This first brick of ownership is the foundation of an essential framework for implementing an ambitious digital strategy, using data skillfully, as a lever of value creation at every level of the company.
