Myer

Retail, Australia
Focus: data mining for customer intelligence

Retailing is undergoing major change. New brands and specialty stores proliferate; fashion cycles shorten; consumers have ever wider choice; competition increases.

Retailers spend years accumulating potentially valuable customer-related data but often in separate databases. Information held by the electrical goods floor has no links to the sporting goods and menswear departments, for example.

All this is changing at Myer, the Australian retailer with 60 upmarket department stores.

Myer is moving all transactional data into one warehouse and using the SAS Customer Intelligence solution to better understand its customers and exploit its MYER one loyalty program.

Stuart Jarvis, Myer’s Customer Strategy Manager, says, “With SAS, we now mine the information and gather intelligence about what our customers are actually doing in our stores. We can now engage in dialogue with them; start building profitable relationships; tell them about special offers that we believe will individually appeal.”   
 
Myer embarked on this exercise with 500,000 customers on its database and now has nearly 2 million. The information is segmented in typical buyer type and buying pattern profiles, and the company is now also undertaking store profiling to facilitate better merchandising decisions.

In 2008, Jarvis plans to take analysis to an even higher level with SAS Enterprise Miner™: “We want a single view of our customer opportunity to make the customer the center of everything, including activities outsourced to third parties and what the competition is doing. The aim is to grow the business significantly, via the intelligence-supported MYER one loyalty program.”