Preparing for the future of retail

with customer data platforms

October 15, 2020
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Shelley Bransten
Corporate Vice President, WW Retail & Consumer Goods Industry

• Customer Stories
• Dynamics 365

Consumer packaged goods companies and retailers are reinventing

ways to serve consumers in a digital world.

What a year 2020 has been so far! Nobody could have predicted some of the
incredible change we have seen. Yet despite all of this change, exceptional
customer experiences remain just as important to the success of a brand as ever
before.

Unified data, connected experiences

Just take your consumer goods business. You are already collecting customer data
from many different sources. From marketing campaigns to online purchases, and
everything in between. But far too often, this data ends up in silos and isn’t used to
its full potential. That is why Microsoft is partnering with leading brands like
Campari Group to build customer data platforms that enable brands to truly
understand customer behavior and intent. And ultimately, deliver more
personalized and meaningful customer experiences.

Campari Group is a leading beverage and spirits manufacturer, with more than 60
brands including Campari, Aperol, Wild Turkey, Skyy, Grand Marnier, and many
others. A multigenerational, family-owned business, Campari Group has been
passionate about delivering great brand experiences for the consumers who enjoy
its products, the bartenders who serve them, the restaurants, bars, and pubs that
sell them, and the distributors that keep shelves stocked. They have grown rapidly
through acquisitions, each bringing in another IT landscape to assimilate including
more than seven martech vendors. And the company works with more than 200
creative and digital agencies that use a variety of different software systems. To
gain a 360-degree customer view and enhance the personalization of its marketing,
sales, and customer service efforts, Campari Group deployed Microsoft Dynamics
365 Customer Insights and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

I had the pleasure of recently sitting down with Chad Niemuth, Vice President,
Global IT – Marketing and Sales, to learn more about Campari Group’s impressive
digital journey and how they are getting the most value from Microsoft’s customer
data platform across the customer journey. Here is an excerpt from our fireside
chat:

Shelley: Campari has made several acquisitions over the years. I can only
imagine that is incredibly exciting, but also comes with its own challenges of
all the silos from bringing new companies in. So maybe share how this has
impacted the business and some of the challenges you have overcome.

Chad: I would say that the acceleration that occurs as a result of acquisitions is
around building scalable approaches that are supported. That includes technology,
as well as process. When you consider your intellectual property as your data—how
your data is managed and where it is managed—and the type of platform that
enables that data to be extendable is critical. For us, that is where a great deal of
our strategies are focused—how do we leverage Microsoft Azure? How do we
leverage the Dynamics 365 portfolio including Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and
Dynamics 365 Marketing? As a result of COVID, how do we accelerate opportunities
for our global markets? We are currently distributed in 190 countries. We have 21
direct in-market companies, and 22 manufacturing plants globally. So there is a
great deal of information that needs to be spread and silos that need to be broken
down in order to deliver a consistent experience for our consumers. And that is our
focus: how to move the right data to the right place, at the right time, to make the
right decision.

Shelley: It is obviously a very competitive industry, consumer goods, beers,

wines, and spirits. What is top of mind for you, especially given industry
trends and especially in this COVID-19 context?

Chad: During COVID, it has definitely been a dramatic shift in how we manage our
relationships. You have got the fact that so many on-premise bars and restaurants
have been shuttered, locked out, and locked down as a result of COVID. It is a huge
part of our strategy to empower the bartenders to be ambassadors for our brands.
Those bartenders being displaced is a huge, huge opportunity for us to help them,
to connect them to our stories. So that coming out of lockdown, they have the
ability to drive great experiences not only for our consumers, but in their
professional lives as well. So, it’s more than just the brands. It is also giving them
the opportunity to hone their craft, and to expand their trade opportunities. So
COVID has really impacted us there.

Shelley: We’ve learned a lot along the way with you on the single integrated
platform that you have with Dynamics 365 that really connects your customer
data and your marketing automation. Can you talk a little bit about the value
there?

Chad: For us in our organization, we took a crawl, walk, run approach. And we are
still in that crawl phase. We have integrated approximately seven different data
sources. Those seven different data sources provide us valuable information on our
consumers, and it helps us build that relationship and strengthen it, our brand
champions, our brand loyalists. The value that we have started to identify is
opportunities as simple as, what is the email open rate? What is the total
acquisition that we’re acquiring in consumers, in bartenders? What is their
engagement level? These are all baseline value metrics that we have going into this
and we are learning and growing and expanding.

Though Campari Group is still in the early stage of their data integration journey,
their future roadmap includes connecting to a greater number of customer data
sets across markets and new touchpoints such as website interactions. The move
from physical to digital engagement enabled by Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
has helped Campari Group be more agile and responsive to market changes. They
have been able to maintain engagement and respond with timely communications
to customers even with some of their traditional channels hugely disrupted due to
the pandemic. Watch the full fireside chat here:

A future built on strong trust

Today’s customers do not buy just products or services. More and more, their
purchase decisions revolve around the experience. In the last year and a half, we’ve
established ourselves as a trusted partner to some of the world’s largest brands and
retailers including Land O’Lakes, PepsiCo, Walmart, Kroger, and Walgreens Boots
Alliance, among others. What these companies have in common is their
commitment to delivering compelling experiences for their customers and ability to
embrace data to help connect with customers. As we look to the future, with
changes in consumer goods and retail, customer data platforms are becoming even
more vital for brands and retailers that wish to strengthen their customer
relationships. Learn more about Campari Group’s success story and Dynamics 365
Customer Insights.
We're always looking for feedback and would like to
hear from you. Please head to the Dynamics 365
Community to start a discussion, ask questions, and
tell us what you think!
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