Customer Success
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Customer Success |
Catalina Marketing helps predict customer behavior with SAS®SAS® helps Catalina deliver the right messages to the right customers, right at the point-of-saleIf you’ve ever purchased an item at a retail grocery store and received a coupon at checkout for the same product, or something similar, you’re familiar with Catalina Marketing. As the largest customer behavior marketing company in the world, Catalina analyzes and predicts shoppers’ buying behaviors to generate customized point-of-sale color coupons, advertisements and informational messages for retail stores and pharmacies nationwide.
A recipe for success
“We build models now to help our manufacturer customers reach the shoppers who are most likely to be interested in their new products, enabling them to increase profitability from their new product introductions,” says Wachter.
“Not only that, but our samples are 10 to 15 times larger than anything anyone else is doing today,’’ Williams says. “Nobody could do what SAS is enabling us to do – the capabilities just didn’t exist beforehand.” Managing massive amounts of data Catalina maintains a database of shopper purchasing information over a three-year period of nearly 140 million consumers. As Catalina Marketing built this network, executives knew they needed a data mining tool that could handle incredible volume – as much as 650 billion-row data tables. “When we put down the number of records we need to store, other software vendors could not meet the demand,” said Williams. “Another aspect of data this robust is that we’re now assessing millions of variables to identify which will provide the most accurate predictions,” adds Wachter. The company also needed a solution that was easy to use because nonprogrammers needed the ability to do some of the modeling. “SAS gave Analytics the ability to offer added value to the organization since it can handle large volumes of data and has user-friendly options so now everyone on our Analytical staff can perform sophisticated analyses. That’s a big deal for us,” says Wachter. New products = new customers Using SAS, Catalina has developed the “Innovator Model” to help its clients acquire new customers for innovative new consumer packaged goods products that leverage new technologies, offer new tastes or in some way deliver a brand new product to the marketplace. These are products that have no direct competitor, so it isn’t easy to determine exactly which consumers would be most interested in trying it. Wachter explains, “What the Analytics team can do through SAS is identify products that bear different similarities to aspects of a product a company wants to introduce. We can find the combinations of other categories or brands or flavors that suggest the people who would be most likely to try the new product. SAS allows us to play with the data and be flexible.’’ “We’ve been helping our clients reach the right people with the right messages for 25 years,” says Williams. “But with the predictive capabilities we have with SAS tapping into the historical purchasing data of almost every grocery shopper in the US, we’re able to do it with more precision than anyone else in the market.” Copyright © SAS Institute Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
Eric Williams
Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer Catalina Marketing
Challenge:
Catalina Marketing needed the ability to analyze massive amounts of data to accurately predict which customers would be most likely to respond to targeted marketing offers.
Solution:
Using SAS® Enterprise Miner™, Catalina is better able to build exciting loyalty programs and increase relevant offers to find the most profitable shoppers for its clients.
Benefits:
Catalina is able to deliver incentives that are redeemed at eight times the level of traditional program methods. Many of its programs have consumer response rates as high as 25 percent. “We’ve been helping our clients reach the right people with the right messages for 25 years, but with the predictive capabilities we have with SAS, we’re able to do it with more precision than anyone else in the market.” Eric Williams Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer Read more:
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Catalina helps retail customers reach shoppers at the point-of-sale and continues to promote its brands online with a unique interactive experience. Catalina’s marketing network is installed in more than 23,000 stores and 14,000 retail pharmacies in the US and 7,000 stores worldwide, collecting data from more than 250 million transactions every week.
