The affordable luxury handbag brand, Lulu Guinness, was founded in the UK in 1989 and has struggled in recent years to keep abreast with customer behaviours across various shopping channels.
Working with Acxiom, the retailer has been able to identify its different customer types and journeys in order to serve them more effectively and attract new fans to the brand.
"As an affordable luxury accessory brand, it is core to the strategic objective of the business to keep in tune and updated on our customers, and their behaviours across channels. We needed to understand the current status of our existing customers in more detail, before we can look to grow and identify more fans beyond this base," explained Paul Spinks, MD at Lulu Guinness.
Spinks added: "We knew that a key attribute for fans of our product range was affluence, given we have an average price point per bag of £400. But this proved a starting point for greater understanding to grow our audience base. Acxiom also helped us to understand the function of this affluence in more detail."
Database audit
Acxiom began by profiling customers and running a data quality audit. Nearly 40,000 out-of-date or irrelevant pieces of information was removed following the data cleansing process. The audit also identified and removed inaccurate email address from the Lulu Guinness database.
The vendor then used its Personicx solution to profile customer segments and understand more about its shoppers including lifestage, affluence, and digital activity, as well as demographics.
From the profiles, Lulu Guinness now understands similarities between their customers and common interests, as well as the people for whom the brand was less relevant. Heatmapping technology was also used to show where customers were situated in the UK, as well as rankings of popular postcodes.
From this process, Acxiom was able to conclude that Lulu Guinness had over-indexed on three types of customers: empty nesters, established elite and successful families – ranging in age from 25-70. It also concluded the brand was not as popular in less affluent areas of the UK, as well as with pensioners and families with less disposable income.
This information has been used by the retailer to impact media spend – in particular social media.
Paul said: "It has informed our thinking about the best ways to engage with fashion-forward younger customers. Acxiom has shown us that these people can be moved by focusing on our individuality and the quality inherent in our product lines. This has already been plugged into our device strategy for the brand, pushing mobile further up the agenda. It has also been used to assess how we group our customers when it comes to spending on social media as an engagement tool."
Andy Hooper, account director at Acxiom, explained: "Personicx consistently outperforms for our clients as it is the only true individual level behavioural segmentation in the market. Clients increasingly need more granular ‘person level’ information to be able to enhance and also create new 1-2-1 relationships and this cannot be achieved using more generic household information. InfoBase with its rich insight then enhances these findings to help inform marketing strategy and media spend."