Tag: KYC

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Home values and the corner shop

a coffee shop and a store on the corner of the street

A former colleague bought an existing corner shop and began to stock slightly more exotic items. Being on a fairly busy pedestrian thoroughfare in a tourist town, he realized he was being frequently asked about whether or not he would do mail orders and postal deliveries of the merchandise he stocked. This spawned a small e-commerce venture which over time has come to represent more than 75% of the revenue of his business.

Where we live, is still the centre of our universe and the COVID19 pandemic has taught us that accessibility of retail is one of the most appealing pieces of the new work-from-home hybrid norm that many, who would traditionally traipse into the office with a wasteful commute would have to suffer. There are enough surveys out there that will tell you, that for many, working from home is far more appealing than any would have imagined.

One of the characteristics of those that work-from-home, is that they often establish pantry stocks of favourite foods. This might include staples as well as specialities like those that my former colleague is selling. When the stocks start to dwindle these consumers are faced with the question of how to get more.

Building trust is now not just about “who” and “where”, but also about “what”. Retail consumers in the past would have focused very much on the immediacy of supply. Shortages, like the run on toilet paper, supply chain challenges that led to exhausted supply stocks and the closure of many stores due to the lack of footfall became a major headache for retailers. All this and the inability to sustain sales because of the absence of an online presence or relationship with a delivery carrier meant many corner store businesses disappeared.

For many consumers shopping decisions were all about the “when” that has all changed to a focus on “how” and “where”. Assuming retailers all have stock and that I can determine their stock levels and like their price, the decisions come down to proximity, lead time to delivery and costs to service. Previously I have written about the rise of “dark stores“, they remain a constant reminder that the retail network and how consumers think about retail are constantly evolving. While shopping and market shopping changed with the advent of the supermarket and department stores, that was all focused on one-stop shopping and retailers would enhance interest through the cunning positioning “at cost” of low-cost essentials, all inducements to get boots in the door. Today that is not enough.

What used to be all about convenience, now has become a narrative strongly tied to trust. Consumers love Amazon’s dependability so much, that they are prepared to spend hundreds of dollars each, every year, to sustain Amazon delivery reliability. In many instances the Prime offerings arent even necessarily Amazon direct offerings but instead fulfilled by Amazon or furnished by reliable network participants committed to the fast delivery model. We all want to trust that e-retailers are going to supply us with what we want in a prompt and committed timeframe that works for us. If not, we’ll have to go down to the corner store or box store and get what it is we want. Some say that “opportunities to build trust lie in the first and last mile“, and that the whole story is rooted in supply chain effectiveness and efficiency, however, Pretectum thinks about this problem differently.

The Pretectum view is that the real opportunity to build trust in fact lies in the correctness and appropriate use of consumer customer data. It may seem terribly intuitive but the daily reality for many organizations is that they don’t necessarily have great data and the data that they do have may not be quite so ethically sourced or used.

Many traditional retailers were caught off guard by the rise of the digital shopper, my former colleague included. Supplementary services like Food Panda and Hero, Deliveroo, Instacart, Doordash and Postmates and now even Uber eats, have a wide array of choices from plates of food and cans of pet food and toilet paper delivered from the click of a mouse to your doorstep accompanied by the ring of the doorbell.

For the armchair warrior and the introvert, it has become a great unburdening for the need to step out of their habitat except for the most essential of events or circumstances.

The uplift of door-to-door delivery services has also seen more people in this gig economy-related service role of the part-time (or full-time) delivery of goods. But they’re not interested in long-haul transportation gigs, they want short journeys that can be done messenger bag style, covering no more than a couple of miles per delivery.

For the corner store with a heaving stock room and an online presence, yes, they feel the need to engage with one of these platforms but there is nothing to stop them from establishing their own informal local courier network and leveraging the power of their customer data to maintain relationships with their audience.

The challenge with the mainstream platforms is that they have the customer data and they have the customer relationship and your business, as a network participant is dealing with a faceless customer. That means no upsell, no customer loyalty, and no customer relationship. Your little business is at the mercy of the network.

Pretectum’s API-enabled customer master data management platform can be of help, in not only your outbound customer outreach objectives but also in other areas of your e-commerce and regular commerce relationship with your customers.

It doesn’t matter if your business is a hair salon, a nail bar, a tailor, a restaurant, a coffee shop or cafe, a laundromat and dry cleaning business or pet groomers, florists, health care or food and commodity retail. If you have more than a thousand known customers who you want to maintain a continuous and sustained relationship with, then the chances are that your business would benefit from customer master data management.

You’ll be surprised at how cost-effectively you can implement Customer Master data Management (CMDM) and apply it to your business, from search and preferences all the way down to household and duplicate identification. Contact us today, to learn more.

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The Customer is King: But do you know who the Customer is?

boy wearing a prince costume

It’s a very old adage and it is rolled around by companies and consultants the world over. Even my favourite Management and Marketing guru Peter Drucker has a good quote relating to it:

Marketing is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view.

Peter Drucker

But how many companies actually live and breathe it? More fundamentally, how many companies actually know who their customer actually is? And, are they right? Because if the customer is king, but we’re not clear who the customer is, then we’re almost certainly going to make a pretty poor job of serving that king!

The customer is king; the consumer is king.

It appears that in the consumer goods world there is a clear, implicit belief that the consumer is the customer. Indeed, from the responses to this question posted on LinkedIn, it appears that the words consumer and customer can be used interchangeably. Indeed Drucker’s seminal quote) was used for the purpose of justifying the value of consumer-centricity.

The word switch from consumer to the customer is made almost subconsciously in many posts here, which leads me to conclude that the words are completely synonymous in the minds of many in the industry. 

When we say the customer is king – what we often mean is ‘the consumer is king’.

And what is wrong with that? This is the consumer goods industry after all! We know that consumers are important – and that not satisfying them is likely to lead to a very short-lived brand. Isn’t all this semantics? Isn’t it, as one post on the LinkedIn thread suggested, that consumer-centrism lies at the heart of true marketing? Well – let’s see what happens when businesses become too consumer-centric, by way of a case study.

Why do you need to know who your customer really is?

Consumers in one market like to drink beer at parties: so they need lots of stock at home at one time. A brand decides to corner the party market and launches in only a jumbo 48 pack. They launch it at a discount to the market because in research consumers expected to pay less for a bulk pack, but they had also made it a premium quality brew as the target consumer was planning to serve at upmarket events. Needless to say, they researched heavily with consumers and created a brilliant communication message which they leveraged through all available media.

So far, so good, but what happens when it is presented to the trade? Well – it gets rejected by most customers. Retailers are disappointed with the lower-than-average margin, and the fact that it trades down other premium beer buyers on a bottle-to-bottle comparison. Once the buying team is finally bought off, it is rejected by the store operations team as it doesn’t fit on the racking, and given its relatively low rate of sales, it will only get one facing: the equivalent of two units per store. If only they’d thought about the retailer as well as the consumer eh?

Three weeks in the product isn’t selling. Junior managers are dispatched to stores to see what is happening. The product is listed, they report, at the right price. But nothing is happening. Nobody could spot the problem until one bright young manager observes the shoppers. 82% of them have baskets. Even those with trolleys buy only a few items. Following some shoppers back to the parking lot, she observes that there are very few cars, but lots of free courtesy buses. Then it clicks. The pack is way too big to carry home on a bus.

We Three Kings?

The story is exaggerated, but only a little. Perhaps there was a time – fifty or sixty years ago, when complete focus on the consumer was ‘good enough’.

Trade was relatively weak and highly fragmented, so big national brands could easily call the shots.

And for many household goods, the ‘housekeeper/mom/consumer’ controlled what went in and out of the family. But things have changed. Trade consolidation has given retailers power, and that means brands need to serve this customer too. Shoppers are much more influential, behave differently and are influenced by different things than those that influence consumers.

If all we do is focus on them as consumers, we will miss much of the opportunity to learn about them, connect with them, and influence them.

Consumer marketers, don’t fret. The consumer is still king of kings: without consumption brands die, it is as simple as that. But brands must be configured to ensure that they serve all three customers. Branding models may still have the target consumer at their heart, but should also reference what the brand delivers for shoppers and retailers.

Shopper Marketers. The shopper, as the newest king on the block, is most often the one who gets neglected. Ensure your colleagues and peers know the difference between the shopper and the consumer, and how this varies by store type.

Customer managers. Your customer is a king too. Brands that don’t serve retailers will struggle to get to shoppers and therefore to consumers. But we mustn’t make the mistake of serving this king to the detriment of the others, or the detriment of the brand. Just because it is good for your retailer, doesn’t mean it is good for the brand.

The customer is king, but the consumer goods industry has three kings: the consumer, the shopper, and the retail customer. Marketing must move on to a marketing approach which recognizes the need, and indeed the opportunities which come from marketing to these three customers in an integrated manner.

Feel free to contact me if you would like to learn more about how to build brands which work for all three customers, and to use this to drive phenomenal growth and better investment returns.

The original version of this post by Mike Anthony is located here and this repost is with his permission.

The Pretectum CMDM is a customer master data management platform that can be used by organizations to curate zero-party and first-party data that relates to customers that are consumers. The platform is industry agnostic and supports deep integration with various applications that your business may have for more personalized customer interaction. Reach out to find out more.

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Master Data Management Business Requirements

Data Governance Encompasses MDM and CMDM

Master Data Management is seen as a way for the business to address a number of technical and operational problems that may be strategic and tactical in nature.

Triggering events may be new business acquisitions and the wave of new data that may need to be incorporated in a robust de-duplicated way.

Another triggering event may be more rigorous operational scrutiny in response to new public regulations, changes from private to public accountability or compliance pressures.

Changes in organizational leadership accompanied by a revitalisation of the business vision and business strategy may also be a catalyst.

Whatever the cause, there is often a handful of expectations from the business as to what more data governance, influenced by the implementation of an MDM will deliver. With the customer master in particular there is often the belief that more rigorous deduplication, enhancement and data quality in the customer repository will help in improving the Know-Your-Customer (KYC) situation. The establishment of a “360-degree-view” of customer records is seen as a key to supporting KYC.

Software vendors see MDM in particular as a strong software systems-based approach to helping to formulate said views and addressing the needs of business pressures to improve data quality. These solutions focus on technical efficacy without an understanding or a desire to understand the organizational challenges that centralized control and governance of the data have for the day-to-day needs and operational requirements of the business itself.

Further, the approach of many of these solutions is often rooted in data practice theory and built on legacy technology stacks that are robust but aged, and somewhat incompatible with contemporary business-led as opposed to IT-led initiatives.

Expectations

  • The business should be able to define the terms and descriptions that it has for data elements that it uses. In some applications, this is referred to as a glossary but in reality, this is a collection of descriptions and data classifiers.
  • The business should be able to define the customer in a single way for all business areas to adhere to where the function is fully centralized. The business should be able to define what a customer record should look like in totality if this is required, especially if this is necessary for integration with systems.
  • The business should be able to use core elements of the defined customer with extensions by other areas of the business where the approach is looser or decentralized. Every business area may have a lens through which it chooses to see the customer, which may have supplementary attributes or simply a subset of all the elements that the systems require.
  • Data itself is created or collated centrally
  • The data is assessed in real-time and in batches as well as recurrent cycles for anomalies relative to the data definitions in place.
  • The data is identified for potential duplicates
  • the duplicates can be grouped, consolidated or merged via fully automated, semi-automated or manual methods, according to the needs of the business.
  • The data definitions can be leveraged by ecosystem applications and systems to ensure that records that are created or amended meet the configuration expectations of the MDM
  • The data itself is accessible to ecosystem applications and systems in a secure, authenticated and permission-based way through a syndication approach either in real-time, serially, batched/bulk or through continuous integration.
  • Data design creation and amendment can be established through decisions by a crowdsourced organizational hierarchy of stakeholders and interested parties who can approve/reject the designs.
  • Data creation and changes can, if necessary, also be established through a similar hierarchy of controllers, administrators, curators and stakeholders.
  • Where appropriate, the subjects of the data curation system can engage in a secure, authenticated self-service data curation approach to evaluate the data held and apply further curation.
  • Extensive secure and authenticated integrations are available for a wide array of technologies
  • Extensive reporting is available for compliance and operations on lineage, usage, statistics and data quality.

To learn how the Pretectum CMDM meets these expectations contact us for more information.