E-Catalog CARREFOUR by ARISTID

The distribution of printed catalogs delivered to mailboxes is coming to an end, just as French consumers are actively seeking the best promotional offers to protect their purchasing power.

In response, CARREFOUR, in collaboration with ARISTID, has created the very first “Personalized E-Catalog.” This innovative solution is designed to offer each customer tailored offers that meet their specific needs and preferences.

While advertising catalogs remain THE preferred medium for French consumers to find “good deals”, their current distribution is facing significant challenges.

• The legal framework of the Climate Law, along with the OUI PUB initiative, being tested since September 2023 in 11 major cities, significantly limits the distribution of printed catalogs.
• In addition, the soaring price of paper is driving up production and distribution costs.
• Finally, societal perception of printed media, seen as far more polluting than its digital alternative, combined with the younger generations’ low interest in their mailboxes in favor of digital platforms, further challenges its relevance.

At the same time, the digital version of the catalog; the popular e-catalog has already become ingrained in consumer habits, and the addition of digital features such as sorting, adding to cart, and favorites lists has already won over many CARREFOUR customers.

However, one key feature is still missing from this tool: PRODUCT RECOMMENDATION.

For many years, Carrefour has developed a deep understanding of its customers— their product preferences, the promotions that drive purchases, and much more. However, this customer knowledge had not yet been directly tied to personalized commercial offerings. Instead, promotional offers were primarily distributed through powerful, but uniform and untargeted, mass media channels.

Today, this digital approach, once a staple of marketplaces and e-commerce, has become an integral part of the shopping journey.

It was therefore essential for Carrefour to provide all its customers with a unique and personalized promotional experience that combines the best of the catalog in terms of offer presentation, along with its highly precise customer knowledge, as the retailer with the largest number of stores in France.

To tackle this challenge, Carrefour has teamed up with its technology partner ARISTID. ARISTID Retail Technology is a French software solutions company specializing in the retail sector. ARISTID has been supporting Carrefour for the past five years in the digital transition of all its communication processes.

Thanks to the technological architecture implemented by ARISTID, CARREFOUR can now, for the first time, cross-reference its extensive “big data customer” with its “data lake offer”. This enables the production of an infinite number of fully personalized commercial offers on a very large scale.

This achievement is all the more impressive as it is also enriched by store data, giving the leading French retailer the ability to offer each of its 14 million customers the right product, presented with the right promotion, at the right time, through the channel of their choice, and at the price of their favorite store…

This “data-centric” revolution completely repositions the way commercial communication is created, which was previously very static and entirely centered around the print catalog medium and its physical distribution.

Thanks to these developments, Carrefour and ARISTID are envisioning a multitude of creative ways to exploit this ultra-personalization.

Customer scenarios can be much more precise, more qualitative, more relational, all expression modes are conceivable, and all distribution channels can be used. This technological feat makes commercial proposals much more relevant and thus reduces advertising “over-solicitation.”

Carrefour’s personalized catalog, launched in September 2022 to a portion of the retailer’s customers, prefigures the future of commercial advertising. 

The initial results of this experiment demonstrate strong public acceptance: 6.53% interaction rate vs. 2.78% for non-personalized and +17 points of NPS score from the first wave of mailing in September 2022.