Central Retail turns loyalty data into smarter promotions

Its 5.8 million-member programme is testing whether personalisation can improve promotion efficiency across food and non-food retail.

Central Retail Vietnam is moving beyond broad discounts as it uses loyalty data to sharpen promotional spending and coordinate customer engagement across different retail categories.

The retailer partnered with Eagle Eye to power The 1 Vietnam loyalty programme, giving Central Retail the infrastructure to support personalised promotions and omnichannel engagement across its portfolio.

Aaron Crowe, Head of Revenue for APAC at Eagle Eye, said the strategic value of loyalty increasingly lies in the customer data retailers can use to guide commercial decisions.

“Most retailers think that they're running a loyalty program. What they're really running is one of the most powerful consent data engines in the business,” Crowe said.

For retailers, the key test is whether personalisation can improve returns on promotional budgets rather than simply redistribute discounts. Crowe said personalised offers consistently outperform mass promotions on redemption whilst using the same budget.

Blanket discounting can also erode margins by rewarding customers who might otherwise have paid full price and conditioning shoppers to wait for markdowns.

“The winners in this category aren't discounting the hardest; they are discounting the smartest,” he said.

Cross-category execution is another challenge. Crowe said one programme can work across food and non-food businesses if the underlying architecture is composable, real-time, and open.

That infrastructure also affects speed to market. Crowe said supplier-funded campaigns can be launched within days with the right architecture, compared with months under more rigid systems.

For Central Retail, the commercial opportunity now lies in converting loyalty data into more efficient promotions, faster campaign execution and better coordination across its retail portfolio, whilst limiting the margin leakage associated with broad-based discounting.