More benefits for customers in Hong Kong, Greater China & Macau

Extended case study

Business challenge

Our client (Dairy Farm, part of Jardine Matheson) wanted to create a single customer engagement programme that unified all their businesses. Those businesses were across multiple sectors: Health & Beauty, Grocery, Convenience, Home Furnishing, F&B, Finance and more.

The new brand would be driven by a single App - a simple mobile first solution that would transform the customer experience. This would create a CRM ecosystem that could handle 10M+ weekly transactions, issue points and handle redemption - all in real time.

A new company was created to house the membership programme, new data infrastructure and analytics capability. Partnerships were created beyond the group including with one of Hong Kong’s largest banks, Hang Seng.

Solution

Analytics

Tecsa’s data science partner and technology lead helped structure the data lake using the client’s technology and data teams providing the bedrock for analytics development. The data management platform collates data from multiple sources enabling coherent programme and retail analytics as well as relevant and timely communications to all customers.

This meant that, for the first time, Dairy Farm could understand how all their customers shopped across multiple businesses in real time.

Business development

Tecsa developed the business cases, relationships and proposals to attract some of Hong Kong’s largest consumer businesses to join the Dairy Farm membership programme. The leading retail bank Hang Seng chose to partner with Dairy Farm bringing their hugely successful enJoy credit card proposition to the membership programme as the preferred financial services sponsor. HASE signed a multi-year deal with Dairy Farm with the Tecsa team leading the deal structure, branding and commercial agreement negotiations alongside the Dairy Farm team.

Financial planning

Tecsa worked alongside Dairy Farm’s finance team to build, and validate, a long-term plan for the business. This robust financial plan gave confidence to partners that the membership programme was designed to be sustainable, self-financing, and resilient.

Marketing

Tecsa supported Dairy Farm’s marketing team throughout the project. The team co-created, and selected, the brand name ‘yuu’ after a detailed planning and research process. The joint Tecsa and client team developed a fully integrated launch marketing plan across all customer channels, ensuring the ‘yuu’ message would be seen by everyone in Hong Kong from day one. 

Operations

Tecsa prepared the yuu programme for launch with a full review and support plan to ensure complete operational readiness. This included determining all SLAs with multiple suppliers for technology, people and operational vendors. Tecsa provided a clear governance framework, supplier RFP and audit process and business wide process documentation model. Tecsa worked closely with the client legal & compliance teams to ensure a flawless launch and operational resilience.

Technology

Tecsa guided the client’s technology team to integrate multiple systems, from point-of-sale to CRM, contact centre to payment gateways. Tecsa led the integration of customer data sets into a single, accessible data-lake alongside the data engineering team and of course the development of the customer facing website and extensive mobile App. 

After just over 18 months of detailed preparatory work ‘yuu’ was ready to go. On Thursday, July 30, 2020, yuu launched across Hong Kong in the biggest new brand launch the territory had ever seen.

Lead partners and consultants:

Tony Buffin
Dave Battiston
Gerard Whelan
Richard Campbell
Jonathan Bolden
Julie Scarth
Mark Sage

“The launch of yuu Rewards in July 2020 represented a critical milestone in driving Dairy Farm's modernisation and digital transformation. yuu will support a more customer-centric approach across all the Dairy Farm banners and drive an enhanced level of customer engagement.”

John Witt, Managing Director, Jardine Matheson Holdings Limited

Results

yuu teamed up with George and Alex Lam in an unprecedented multi-channel brand launch. George is famous throughout the Asian region, with pop hits straddling five decades. His son Alex is a well-known Hong Kong celebrity and social media influencer. The team took one of George’s many hits - the Billy Joel classic, Uptown Girl - and turned it into the ‘yuu Rewards’ launch song, playing across social, digital and media channels and non-stop in all Dairy Farm outlets. 

The media message was simple; Download the App and sign up for yuu today. 

Customers were able to merge their Mannings account and enJoy credit card immediately receiving new yuu Rewards points. The external marketing effort was backed up by fully trained Team Members and in-store specialists who helped further drive sign-up, with floor to ceiling POS in over 2,000 outlets across Hong Kong.

The brand launch was a significant success, with near universal recognition of the name ‘yuu’ within just six weeks of launch.

Customer engagement was no less spectacular. Within ten days over two million Hong Kongers, well over a third of the adult population, had signed up digitally for yuu Rewards and that number continues to grow. 

Immediate results were seen across all Dairy Farm banners with growth in sales, customer engagement and key retail value drivers performing ahead of expectations.

Project Insight
95%

The brand name ‘yuu’ was recognised by 95 per cent of Hong Kongers just six weeks after launch