Authentic Brands Kicks Consumer Data Strategy Into High Gear with New CDP
Authentic Brands Group has embarked on a new data management strategy aimed at unifying consumer insights and leveling up digital experiences across its roster of brands.
With over 40 brands in its portfolio — including Reebok, Nine West, Forever 21, Aéropostale, and Eddie Bauer — Authentic’s CDP houses over 200 million consumer data files and interacts with shoppers across 375,000 points of sale globally. The group has tapped Amperity to drive the development of the platform, partnering with the enterprise CDP provider to draw together and activate data from pre-purchase, point-of-sale, and post-purchase customer care touch points.
The New York-headquartered group has a large global retail footprint, with 10,500-plus freestanding stores across 150 countries. Most recently, the group acquired British lifestyle brand Ted Baker in a $254 million deal. In 2021, the group also purchased Reebok from Adidas in a landmark $2.5 billion deal.
The company says the partnership will also help boost the in-store experience at their many brick-and-mortar locations by resolving identities and using expansive consumer data to drive key business decisions at scale.
Authentic’s chief digital officer, Adam Kronengold praised “the clean data foundation” the partnership would bring to the group of brands, allowing the company to move forward with plans to improve the customer experience more broadly.
The Shifting Sands of Consumer Data
The way brands think about and use consumer data is changing all the time — largely by necessity. Privacy laws and evolving consumer expectations mean an effective data strategy is getting harder and harder to pin down.
"What consumers feel about privacy is constantly a moving target. [...] In the long run, firms will benefit most when they are transparent about how they collect and utilize consumer data and give consumers some say in what is collected, analyzed, and shared,” J. Andrew Petersen, associate professor of marketing at the Smeal School of Business at Penn State, in a recent conversation with CGT.
Surveying the landscape more broadly, brands are catching on to this need to build a solid data foundation, oftentimes through consolidating, unifying, and segmenting consumer insights. For example, Coca-Cola has worked to centralize its data over the last two years, implementing a new CDP that improves consumer access to hundreds of products while gathering targeted data points from the brand’s 2 billion-strong global customer base.
Similarly, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman's parent company Tapestry has put in place a consumer data platform that allows the group to leverage consumer data through the full value chain, weaving these insights into day-to-day decision-making, product creation and its understanding of the consumer journey.
Interested in learning more about how market leaders are bringing data to life? Register for Analytics Unite, the Summit for Retail and Consumer Brands.
