Why Dan Murphy’s is taking cues from Netflix and Spotify

Paige Murphy
By Paige Murphy | 5 December 2019
 

Liquor company Endeavour Group, which owns Dan Murphy’s and BWS, has shifted its personalisation strategy to take on a Netflix and Spotify approach.

Speaking at Oracle Modern Cloud Day in Sydney, Endeavour Group head of data and personalisation Andy Sutton says the company has moved away from relying just on predictive repeat purchases.

“If you buy a bottle of wine, you buy one every week. As long as you keep delivering to that, you can easily predict what customers will repeat,” Sutton says.

“We want to go a step further and bring new products that are recommended to a customer.”

In Dan Murphy’s alone, there are approximately 5,000 varieties of wine on offer which can be difficult for customers to discover new products that they may like.

Sutton says the group is looking to the likes of Netflix and Spotify, rather than fellow competitors, to introduce these products based on a customer’s preferences.

“Netflix doesn’t recommend the same thing to you over and over again. If you’ve watched the film, you won’t get it recommended again,” Sutton says.

“There are multiple ways you can classify things being the same. So, what we’re trying to do is bring up that Netflix or Spotify to wine and do something similar. That’s our goal.”

It has started to roll this strategy out through its email marketing with plans to bring it online.

Sutton says using this model has already shown results for the group’s revenue.

“When we send emails with a model behaviour in them, we generate about 20 cents per email,” he says.

“When we send no model - just spam - we get more like six cents per email, which is three and a half times difference which has huge implications for us in terms of how we generate our revenue.”

Moving beyond just offering similar flavours or the same brand, Sutton says it is able to recommend based on niche requirements like grape variety or the region a wine is from.

As part of the strategy, it has launched a discovery engine which attempts to predict the next best product a customer can buy.

The company’s loyalty program My Dan’s has 3.8 million members with around 70,000 customers joining each month.

Each week it scores these members against the different products available and makes new recommendations.

At the moment it is only done weekly but Sutton says there are plans to have the engine work in real-time and in-store.

“Once we’ve rolled that out, we’ll roll it into other channels – into our online channels, we can personalise the online journey and ultimately into stores,” he says.

“If you’re a customer and you walk into store, your phone triggers a beacon in the store then we can push you a recommended product based on what we think you’re going to buy next.”

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