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Apr 29, 2019
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Creativity, data and customer-centricity are key drivers for Harrods says CMO

Published
Apr 29, 2019

Amanda Hill has been in her role as CMO and Chief Customer Officer at Harrods for a year and in that time we’ve seen the retailer’s comms being transformed with a more content-driven approach, new star editorial staff joining the team, the launch of podcasts and more.


Amanda Hill of Harrods has a razor sharp focus on the customer


Hill was on stage at the Futr conference in London late last week talking about the marketing challenges Harrods faces and what customer-centricity means today.

“I’ve got a team [of hundreds] that goes from data to marketing and comms through to private shopping, magazines, publishing, social, digital – every single thing that touches the customer,” she said. And the driving force throughout is ‘customer-centricity’. But while companies might think that’s been the case for years, she disagrees.

Her previous employers “would say they were customer-centric, but I think customer-centricity is really new,” she explained. “All of retail has been driven by trading results – what products sold, what brands sold, contribution per square foot. Nobody ever looked further. Now our success is based on what you could call customer P&L: if customers came back, how much did they buy? What was the lifetime value of that customer?”

But just why is that approach so new? Hill thinks it’s because one crucial thing was missing in the past. “You need the data to do it,” she said. Data has created huge change that allows companies to spend more time "applying proper commerciality in terms of how you think about customers and growth.”

CONTENT AND CREATIVITY

There’s a creative element that’s also crucial and that has driven much of the development in her department in the past year.

“Content is a massive new shift,” she said. If you're going to be customer-centric, you can't just ‘dish out’ a message, because nobody wants to hear it, so marketing has become editorial.” Having been in TV for 17 years, she knows a lot about the need to keep the customer entertained and engaged and moving into retail, “the first thing I did was bring in journalists, top journalists in their field,” she said. “My fashion editor is one of the top fashion editors in the world, my watches editor is the best watch editor in Europe. They're people who can communicate with the customer as they’re people who aren't just looking at trends but who are in the trend.”

Of course, she concedes that the hard part comes in linking up the creative with the scientific element of data. That’s why her diverse team of content creators, techies and more are all mixed in together. “You're teaching the editorial team to read data,” she said, “as they’ve got to be able to do that to find out what worked, what didn't work. The creatives have to learn how to read the data and the data people need to learn how to communicate with the creatives.”

She believes that “it’s customer-centricity when those two things come together. You’re actually doing what the customer wants to see and feel and hear, not what you think is interesting for them,” based both on what the data tells you and on the constant flow of ideas.

So does that mean her approach is anchored in technology with a creative overlay? Not as much as you’d think as it's much less formulaic.

“I'm not really that interested in spangly technology,” she explained. “But I really care about what I'm trying to do and whether technology can solve it. I sit next to my CTO and he’s told me not to ‘solutionise’, never go to him with the idea or tell him ‘I’ve seen something, and I think we should do it.' He says ‘tell me what your problem is,’ what’s the problem I’m trying to solve and can technology be a friend in there?” 


Harrods' social media posts have become more inspirational but also more data driven in the past year



That seems to mesh perfectly with her own approach as she admits she’s “not excited by the latest [tech] gimmick if it’s not of service to what I’m trying to do.”

And that makes good commercial sense given the types of customers the company is targeting: hugely diverse, very global, with incomes ranging from average to mega-sized.”

For the largest group of mid-range spenders, data can be “invaluable because you can’t know them on a one-to-one basis,” Hill said. But in a world where ultra-luxury is a key part of any high-end retailer’s offer, there’s another group where data is of less use.

This has resulted in luxury retailers and e-tailers upping their game for their VIP customers with much more personal service and Hill acknowledged that this is important for Harrods too.

“There’s a group of customers in luxury where data doesn’t actually mean anything,” she said. “In luxury you have a small amount of customers who don’t want you to generalise about them. There’s a really important part our customer base where I don’t have data on them as it’s about how well I know them. I need to know that they like art, that they like wine. But I need to know the actual wine and the right vintage!” That's something data simply can't do.

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