E-Catalog CARREFOUR by ARISTID

The distribution of printed catalogs through letterboxes is living its last hours. At a time when the French are looking for the best promotional offers to preserve their purchasing power… to offer each of its customers offers that correspond to their needs, CARREFOUR has created with ARISTID the first “personalized e-catalogue”.

While advertising catalogs are still THE preferred way for french people to find “bargains”, the way they are distributed today is being severely challenged.

• The legal framework of the French climate law and the OUI PUB system, which has been tested since September in 11 major conurbations, severely restrict print distribution.
• The soaring price of paper, which increases the cost of distribution.
• The societal perception of print media as much more polluting than their digital counterparts.
• And by the fact that new generations are less attracted to their mailboxes than to the time they spend on new digital platforms.

At the same time, the digital version of the catalog: the famous e-catalog has already become the norm, and the addition of digital sorting, shopping basket and favorites list functionalities has already won over many CARREFOUR customers.

However, this tool lacks one function: product recommendation. This digital usage, which has become a staple of marketplaces and e-commerce, has become commonplace in the purchasing process.

Over the years, CARREFOUR has learned to know its customers and to know which products they prefer, which promotions are most likely to trigger a purchase… Until now, the brand had not linked this customer knowledge to a commercial expression, the promotional offer was conveyed by a very powerful but uniform and general mass media.

It was therefore crucial for CARREFOUR to be able to offer all its customers a unique and personalized promotional experience, taking the best of the catalog in terms of offer presentation, and combining it with the ultra-precise customer knowledge of France’s largest retailer.

To meet this challenge, Carrefour relied on its technology partner ARISTID. ARISTID Retail Technology is a French company specializing in software solutions for the retail sector. For the past 5 years, ARISTID has been supporting CARREFOUR in the digital transition of all its communication processes.

Thanks to the technological architecture put in place by ARISTID, CARREFOUR can now, for the first time, combine all the wealth of its “big customer data” with its “offer data lake”. This will enable the company to produce an infinite number of totally personalized commercial offers on a very large scale.

This feat is all the more impressive in that it is also enriched by store data, enabling France’s leading retailer to offer each of its 14 million customers the right product, presented with the right promotion, at the right time, via the channel of their choice, and at the price of their favorite store…

This “data-centric” revolution is totally repositioning the way commercial communication is produced, which until now has been very static and entirely centered around the print catalog medium and its physical distribution.

Thanks to these developments, Carrefour and ARISTID can envisage a multitude of creative uses for this ultra-personalization. Customer scenarios can be much more precise, more qualitative, more relational, the modes of expression are all conceivable and the distribution channels are all exploitable.

This technological prowess makes commercial proposals much more relevant, and therefore reduces advertising “over-solicitation”.

The CARREFOUR personalized catalog, launched in September 2022 among some of the retailer’s customers, prefigures the future of commercial advertising.

The initial results of this experiment show strong public acceptance: 6.53% interaction rate v/s 2.78% for non-personalized advertising, and +17pts NPS score from the first wave of mailings in September 2022.