Crate & Barrel Makes Smarter Marketing Decisions with Customer Data

Business Situation

Crate and Barrel sought to drastically improve customer segmentation modeling in order to respond to more frequent and dynamic market opportunities. The ability to move from a concept idea to outbound customer marketing campaigns in a few days rather than weeks promises to have a meaningful impact on business performance.

This is not an easy challenge for any large retail organization to overcome given institutionalized processes and systems. These processes have provided great success to-date but must be accelerated to respond to an increasingly competitive market. In addition, the marketing team could not easily obtain and analyze data to determine program performance or gain business insights for the recommendation of new programs.

Solution

A variant of Maven Wave’s Cloud Big Data reference architecture was implemented alongside the existing environment, providing a blueprint for future direction. Maven Wave leveraged three components of the Google Cloud Platform – Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and BigQuery – to establish an operational environment aligned with Crate & Barrel’s current processes to improve customer segmentation modeling. The cloud-based analytics platform delivers over 40 Tableau reports and dashboards to help the marketing team easily extract insights from data and make smarter marketing decisions.

Results

Maven Wave implemented a query process that executed the desired set of queries in less than 5 minutes vs. 4-5 hours on the previous environment – a 10x reduction in internal team hours for these processes. This dramatically decreased the time to market for marketing campaigns. The operationalized solution is automated, repeatable and extensible for additional data sets and features. These new capabilities allow the marketing team to focus on their core competencies and extract and analyze data in seconds or minutes instead of weekly or monthly.