Companies across industries leverage customer data platforms (CDPs) to unify their data, enhance insights, and power personalization. And, for some industries – like consumer-packaged goods (CPG) and retail – the adoption of first-party data strategies and the integration of offline and online data may be newer initiatives. At BlueConic, we pride ourselves on providing customers with best-in-class tools for all their data liberation and management efforts – whether that’s tackling advanced use cases or starting anew.
Recently, our commitment to enabling first-party strategies for retailers and CPG companies was recognized when BlueConic was named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: “Worldwide Retail and CPG Customer Data Platform Software Providers 2022 Vendor Assessment.” (Doc #US47506221, April 2022)
IDC MarketScapes evaluate vendors using a rigorous methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria. This assessment looked at 13 CDPs through the lens of retail and CPG companies and their use cases to identify top providers in the segment. In addition to detailing the strengths of each vendor, the report also reviews trends and includes recommendations for selecting a provider.
We are honored by this recognition of our efforts to support growth-focused users in the retail and consumer goods industries and are confident that our platform solves their top customer engagement concerns.
Three Reasons BlueConic was recognized for Retail and CPG Pain Points
Unifying offline and online data into a single customer profiles
As with many industries, retailers and CPG companies have long faced issues with internal data silos that keep them from having a full understanding of their customers across various sales, marketing, and customer service channels. For retailers, this is made more difficult by complex customer journeys that include both physical and digital touchpoints over various devices and that often span beyond the time limit of a cookie. For CPG companies, the historical lack of first-party data is a barrier – even setting up data collection in this era requires an eye towards privacy and consent. While both hope to drive omnichannel, to-the-moment experiences, having access to unified, actionable data is the first step.
Customer data platforms for retailers and CPG companies, like BlueConic, help break down silos and organize data into a privacy-compliant, persistent, unified customer profile. Being able to tap into this previously inaccessible first-party data is a boon, especially as third-party cookies are set to disappear for good in 2023.
Take BlueConic customer HEINEKEN, for example. Realizing that DMPs would soon be less reliable than ever, HEINEKEN embarked on a journey to start creating unified profiles that would serve as the basis for their segmentation.
BlueConic enables each of their three brands — Heineken, Tecate, and Dos Equis — to build customer profiles that progressively update for known and anonymous individuals as they engage with the company both online and offline. They then rely on this single customer view to create segments in BlueConic and send them directly to their ad platforms. Having insight into their segments and first-party data for the first time, HEINEKEN has begun building bespoke, personalized experiences to drive customer retention and engagement through email campaigns.
The IDC MarketScape recognized BlueConic’s ability to develop a single customer view, with report co-author Filippo Battaini, Research Manager of IDC Retail Insights at IDC, explaining: “The platform’s core capabilities support retail and CPG companies in gaining greater control over first-party data to enhance customer experience, time to market, and operational efficiencies as well as build first-party data assets for revenue growth.”
Enabling lifecycle marketing and personalization
With real-time, integrated access to unified customer profiles, growth-focused users at retail and CPG companies can develop messaging that is consistent, timely, and personalized not only to each consumer, but also to their stage in their customer journey.
As Battaini described: “BlueConic supports retail and CPG companies’ marketing programs in the acquisition, conversion, engagement, and retention [of] customer life-cycle phases. Unified profiles, including updated transactions and real-time behavioral and predictive scores, are used as the basis of life-cycle orchestration, helping retailers and CPG companies create relevant messaging at every point of the customer life cycle to enhance customer experience.”
With BlueConic’s orchestration capabilities, including onsite personalization, a recommendations engine, and Lifecycles, you can visualize and analyze how consumers move across the journey – and then develop integrated, cross-channel engagement efforts based on those stages. For retail and CPG companies, the ability to understand consideration, purchase, and re-purchase cycles is complicated by the online/offline path, as described above. BlueConic makes it easy for marketers and other business users to develop omnichannel segments of similar customer behavior and to orchestrate real-time, relevant responses.
Because unified customer profiles provide a single view of the customer, one retailer uses the lifecycle orchestration capabilities in BlueConic to suppress campaigns when there is an open ticket for delivery issues associated with a profile. With real-time updates to profiles, retailers and CPG companies can focus on creating truly customer-centric experiences.
Speed from Ideation to Benefits
“BlueConic’s CDP offers solid delivery with short and efficient setup and integration lead time. According to the vendor, time to value for BlueConic’s solution can be measured in weeks in terms of monetization and efficiency in terms of use cases implementation,” writes Battaini.
On average, BlueConic customers see operational benefits from using BlueConic in a matter of months. The retail and CPG landscape is packed with an immeasurable number of brands vying for wallet share across similar products. As a result, the need to differentiate – across product, yes, but also across communication tactics – is high. Growth-focused users also know that doing so quickly is key. BlueConic’s combination of an intuitive, non-technical platform and dedicated customer support teams means retail and CPG customers can get to action faster.
Although both retail and CPG have industry-specific use cases, they each have a need to strengthen their first-party data efforts in light of changing consumer privacy legislation, cookie deprecation, and consumer desire for consented, personalized interactions.
To learn more about IDC MarketScape’s perspective on what makes BlueConic a Leader in supporting these efforts, download an excerpt of the report.
