Before, there were two segments: those who spend and everyone else
When I arrived, the company had a base of several thousand customers and two segments: those who spent a lot, and everyone else. That is not a caricature, it is the rule that actually drove discounts. Assigning a customer to a discount group was done by hand, margin was eroding under stacked discounts, and most customers had no idea which category they were in.
A two-box segmentation is not a segmentation, it is a judgement. It does not tell you when a good customer is drifting away, which one is worth calling back, or how long normally passes between two purchases. So it enables no decision, except granting a discount at the till.
The work was to build a real typology from actual transactions rather than from shop-floor impressions, then translate it into a commercial system that store teams can apply. This page is about the method, not the company's figures, which are theirs.
A premium retail group across three countries, with a European e-commerce channel. The product was strong, customers were attached to the brand, and the data existed: every till transaction had been recorded for years. Nobody had ever used it for anything but accounting. The consequence fits in one sentence: the company knew how much it had sold, it did not know to whom, or whether that person would come back.
A till database is not a customer database. Records were created on the fly, with no reliable unique identifier, with duplicates, empty fields and email addresses missing on the large majority of entries. Second constraint: whatever we built would be applied by store teams, in three countries and four languages, with no sophisticated CRM. A segmentation the till cannot read does not exist. And third: the mandate ran to development-finance standards, so everything had to be documented and transferable.
1 · Week one: listen and decide.
On site. Understand what the cooperative does, what its buyers and partners need to believe, and what the members are proud of. Positioning written and validated in the room, not by email.
2 · Week two: build the identity.
Visual identity designed against the positioning: name system, marks, colours, typography, and rules simple enough to be applied without a design team. Every choice tested against one question: does this raise institutional trust?
3 · Week three: ship the assets.
The working kit the cooperative actually needed: documents, signage, presentation materials, templates. Delivered with a short guide and a working session so the members could produce their own materials next month.
4 · Spend where perception changes.
The budget went into the few physical touchpoints partners actually see. Nothing was spent on deliverables that flatter the consultant.
2024 mandate, three countries and an e-commerce channel.
- From two discount categories assigned by hand to ten named, computed segments
- Three segmentation methods built and compared on the same base, with the discard rate published
- Abnormal-silence threshold computed per country, as a median, to trigger callbacks at the right moment
- Customer tier grid written in both working languages, with benefits and rules per tier
- Loyalty logic inverted, from the discount that erodes margin to the credit that brings the customer back
- Bilingual welcome script at the till, unique identifier and mandatory fields, so the base stops degrading
- Operational reactivation campaign built on the segments, with call script and appointment booking
Plenty of companies believe they have an acquisition problem when what they have is a customer knowledge problem. As long as the base only separates those who spend from everyone else, every media pound goes on re-buying people you already had. A useful segmentation is not an analysis, it is an instrument: it names groups the teams recognise, it gives a trigger threshold, and it fills itself because collection was fixed at the same time.
Does your customer base tell you anything beyond revenue?
The first call30 minutes. We talk about your traction and what is blocking it. You leave with 2 or 3 moves you can act on. No pitch.
A marketing function built from zero, in a company that had none
Constraint: no marketing function in place, everything to build.
Read the case studyOne group budget, nine country budgets, and one definition per metric
Constraint: ten markets, ten budget formats, no line authority.
Read the case study