Three IT capabilities enable Groupe Casino's precision marketing:

With the foregoing written and ready to go to press my colleague Leslie Hand took me to her meeting with Modiv Media at the Shop & Stop around the corner from IDC. Shop & Stop, a subsidiary of Royal Ahold, has a long history of innovation in particular for the shopper's in-store experience. John Caron, senior vice president of marketing, and Jason Carney, director of operations and technology, of Modiv Media updated us on the company's years-long program with Shop & Stop. They walked us through a demo of the Modiv Shopper, a handheld scanning and media-delivery device, the consumer-facing locus of the grocer's program to re-engineer its relationship with the shopper.

In broad strokes, Modiv Shopper puts Stop & Shop ahead of Groupe Casino in two key respects. First, scale and maturity, in that Stop & Shop runs one million transactions per month on these devices in about 300 stores, ringing up $1 billion in annual sales. An iPhone pilot is less than 60 days away. Second, material impact, in that Stop & Shop is seeing double-digit increases in basket size and an uptick in consumers acting on up-sell and cross-sell promotions. It's also found a new and more profitable channel for CPG market development dollars.

The Modiv Shopper integrates with in-store scales, deli systems. and POS and the chain's CRM loyalty program with the customer. Behind the scenes, when a shopper checks in, a Stop & Shop loyalty application loads targeted offers, tailored for that shopper's transaction history, on the device complementing store-level or chain-wide promotions already loaded on it. This makes more of the offers presented relevant to the shopper. The in-store wifi system locates the consumer's general location and every scans updates the system with more accurate data on the shopper's location--all to improve the relevance of Stop & Shop's micro- and one-to-one marketing relationship with the consumer.