Cora – Omnichannel Campaign Transformation
We empowered Cora Romania to build a multichannel digital marketing solution to outperform the competition in the national market.
Situation
Cora, a hypermarket chain in a market dominated by small and medium sized or specialized retailers, needed a digital marketing system to attract and loyalize customers by changing the paradigm of the shopping experience in the country. Traditional marketing campaigns promoted Cora stores as a different level of shopping and the company needed a series of technology features to support the advanced approach to shopping provided by its lavish selection, upscale environment, and unique offers.
A unique demand was the desire to incorporate these features at a subliminal level, so that they are not obvious to the competition. This way, Cora will not only offer a distinct and personalized shopping experience, but it would make it less likely for the competition to close the gap in desirability and loyalty.
Solution
We started with provisioning a marketing solution appropriate for large scale operations and real-time personalization. We created models and use cases to blueprint the necessary digital marketing features, especially for tiered personalization, and we partnered with IBM and brought Unica to Cora.
We created a roadmap for implementation to ensure that features are made available as soon as ready, with a release scheduled every 2-3 months. We designed and implemented the foundation and then delivered features and integrations according to the roadmap while adapting where necessary.
We implemented Unica Campaign and eMessage first, and Marketing Operations once campaigns were scaled to cover most retail categories. We integrated with the personalized offer systems to bring tiered and hyper-personalized offers that factored in previous and predictive purchasing behavior.
We adapted several other pricing and cashier systems to keep up with the rollout schedule of features and ensure that capabilities are integrated across marketing, presentation, pricing, inventory, and point-of-sale systems. We evolved the marketing and operational systems from fragmented execution to confident orchestration while keeping the underlying features out-of-sight of envious competitors.
Outcome
For about 10 years, Cora maintained an aura in the retail business that competitors struggled to match through traditional and digital marketing. In the end, other retailers closed the gap, but Cora was considered the gold standard for them to imitate. The company’s executives stated that these particular features kept the company competitive and in business for years in a very crowded market.