Moodie Insights Breaking new ground in travel retail data analytics

Technology has advanced greatly in this space over the last ten years, and our tools utilise a combination of both advanced and predictive analytics to help reach clearer decisions, far more efficiently than ever before.

We are able to help understand the drivers of growth, including whether it is attributable to traffic increases, average spend or items per transaction. We then use this to deep dive into category and product level opportunities.

Using transaction data we are able to help optimise all elements of the marketing mix, including price and promotion, range and assortment as well as more deeply understand the effectiveness of both traditional and digital marketing programmes.

Because our tools are looking at every single transaction, every minute of every day we are also able to isolate customer behaviour through time of day and day of week. This enables us to provide more specific recommendations that can help to improve the retail offer to be most relevant to the customer.

The key point of difference for our business is how user-friendly our tools are, making it much faster and more efficient for our partners to understand and action changes in their business in real time.

This used to be only the domain of data science experts; however our tools enable any commercial leader to quickly understand the drivers of performance within their business.

In the past, the process to optimise range and assortment, review promotional effectiveness or understand the impact of price changes required long and tedious work for specialist category management or market intelligence team members.

Many of these processes now can be automated, allowing any member of the team to access sophisticated analytical techniques and data visualisations that improve clarity, consistency and efficiency.

During my time in marketing and commercial leadership roles, the majority of these processes were managed manually, often using just Excel spreadsheets. The advancement in technology now means that we can spend 80% of the time focused on building clearer strategies and driving execution, rather than 80% of our time just trying to wrestle with data to identify opportunities!

Absolutely. We often talk about being frictionless when managing data; which simply means being able to make informed and clear commercial decisions in real time.

Our industry needs practical tools, that are easy and functional – and don’t require a team of rocket scientists to operate. Typically Big Data solutions will be under-utilised or sidelined if they are not accessible to key decision makers who want rapid access to information that they need.

Most leaders want their teams focused on developing fantastic ideas that will drive growth, and most importantly on executing them brilliantly.

Over the last ten years we have seen rapid developments in the application of technology to drive a greater level of informed decision making. Emerging technologies such as predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence offer potential to transform the speed and effectiveness of the way we make decisions in our organisations.

In the past, often by the time you would commission research or conduct analysis it would prove so time-consuming that the window of opportunity to execute against the insights developed would be lost.

I believe that the real opportunity lies in listening to, and acting on, customer data to enhance the retail offer and drive business performance. As leaders, what we really want is agility. I want to be able to understand my business performance, including what my customers want; develop and implement ideas, test and learn all within a weekly rather than monthly or annual cycle.

We see enormous opportunity in the future to drive much greater collaboration between airport operators, retailers and brands that in turn can improve our customer and passenger experience through the total customer journey.

Actually, we recognise that within the travel retail environment, there is a heightened sensitivity of data sharing, and a greater reluctance to share information compared to other retail sectors. One of our key goals is to create collaborative category based partnerships that can create value and drive growth for each of the stakeholders within the sector.

None. We operate with a strict ‘Chinese wall’ in place and with absolute (and legally committed) confidentiality in place. And anyway, I know from my experience with Diageo and through dealings with the leading travel retailers that Moodie International’s level of trust within the business is extraordinary. Moodie Insights is all about growing the cake, not slicing it.

As a young business our key goal is to build a reputation for helping our partners increase sales through improving the retail offer and increasing sales conversion. As an industry we must be continually striving to create amazing experiences that create engagement and excitement in our outlets. We think Moodie Insights can deliver exactly that.