Across the Pond and Around the Corner: Groupe Casino and Stop & Shop

From IDC, January 24, 2011

With the foregoing written and ready to go to press my colleague Leslie Hand took me to her meeting with Modiv Media at the Shop & Stop around the corner from IDC. Shop & Stop, a subsidiary of Royal Ahold, has a long history of innovation in particular for the shopper's in-store experience. John Caron, senior vice president of marketing, and Jason Carney, director of operations and technology, of Modiv Media updated us on the company's years-long program with Shop & Stop. They walked us through a demo of the Modiv Shopper, a handheld scanning and media-delivery device, the consumer-facing locus of the grocer's program to re-engineer its relationship with the shopper.

In broad strokes, Modiv Shopper puts Stop & Shop ahead of Groupe Casino in two key respects. First, scale and maturity, in that Stop & Shop runs one million transactions per month on these devices in about 300 stores, ringing up $1 billion in annual sales. An iPhone pilot is less than 60 days away. Second, material impact, in that Stop & Shop is seeing double-digit increases in basket size and an uptick in consumers acting on up-sell and cross-sell promotions. It's also found a new and more profitable channel for CPG market development dollars.

The Modiv Shopper integrates with in-store scales, deli systems. and POS and the chain's CRM loyalty program with the customer. Behind the scenes, when a shopper checks in, a Stop & Shop loyalty application loads targeted offers, tailored for that shopper's transaction history, on the device complementing store-level or chain-wide promotions already loaded on it. This makes more of the offers presented relevant to the shopper. The in-store wifi system locates the consumer's general location and every scans updates the system with more accurate data on the shopper's location—all to improve the relevance of Stop & Shop's micro- and one-to-one marketing relationship with the consumer.

Let me sum up by noting a key difference between what I heard from Mr. Bout and saw from Mr. Flathers regarding Groupe Casino's effort with SAP and what Messrs. Caron and Carney showed me at Stop & Shop. The former presented the broad sweep of a multi-year transformational program and addressed the enterprise-level systems overhaul required to change the frontend of a customer's interaction with the French retailer. The latter focused on the frontend device and attendant services that deliver a new customer experience.

Read the Full Article: IDC