Etail’s Next Steps Are Personalisation And Loyalty, Driven By Data | CMO.com

Willem Wijnen, CMO of multi-national fashion retailer The Sting, talks about how data underpins the company’s ambitions to reward its customers for their loyalty.


What’s the next step for a fully integrated, omni-channel retailer?

In the case of multi-national fashion retail brand The Sting, it’s loyalty and personalisation, all underpinned by data. Speaking to CMO.com after the Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium in Amsterdam in November last year, Willem Wijnen, CMO of The Sting, explained the next stages on the company’s roadmap (Adobe is CMO.com’s parent company).

“We have very loyal customers but we don’t know everything about them yet. We know a lot about our online customers, but not about our store customers,” he explained. “We’re building a mobile app that will bring online and offline together at a customer level, so that we can follow them through all the channels and reward them for their loyalty.”

Wijnen pointed out that data is crucial to The Sting’s ambitions in personalisation and loyalty. The company is currently bringing all its data together and developing a single customer view.

“We want to make it actionable to communicate the right message to every customer at the right time. Or, possibly more importantly, not the wrong message or at the wrong time. It’s easier to kill things than to build them, so it’s very important to only have relevant communications with customers, and that’s all data-driven.”