Hall of Fame Profile: Mir Aamir

It's an exciting time for Safeway as three big-hitting programs – a wellness initiative, a fuel rewards partner program and Just For U – bubble to the surface after years of steady behind-the-scenes work and significant financial investment.Scheduled for a soft launch in the second quarter, the as-yet largely veiled wellness initiative has been touted as a key differentiator that will instill the supermarket operator with credibility as a wellness company. Meanwhile, the fuel rewards partner program is already significantly increasing Safeway's reach by leveraging Chevron and ExxonMobil locations as it continues to roll out to new markets.But the most mature of the three, Just For U, has garnered the most enthusiasm to date. Recently referred to as "the envy of our competition" by chief executive officer Steve Burd, the state-of-the-art digital marketing platform cracks the code for taking advantage of Safeway's mounds of loyalty card data to deliver personalized offers to shoppers.With 5.4 million registrants as of February and 20,000 to 25,000 new users added on a weekly basis, the program continues to exceed Safeway's growth expectations. Registrants already provide 45% of the company's sales, and manufacturer participation has grown from a handful to more than 100 CPGs, who find the program to be an efficient vehicle for introducing new products, upsell, cross-sell, drive trial, retrieve lost shoppers and implement a host of other targeted initiatives.Ultimately, Safeway wants Just For U to serve as the basis of its marketing communications, having recently revealed it would like to eliminate print advertising altogether in favor of the program's more personalized digital ads.President of Customer Loyalty and Digital Technologies Mir Aamir – a key figure in the creation of Just For U who modestly insists credit is due to multiple teams at Safeway – last month was honored at the 20th annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony, held in conjunction with the Shopper Marketing Summit and the Shopper Marketing Effie Celebration. In February, he sat down with Patrycja Malinowska, managing editor of the Path to Purchase Institute's P2PI.org.What experiences brought you to your current role at Safeway?AAMIR: Prior to Safeway, I was a management consultant with A.T. Kearney focused on retail and consumer packaged goods companies. Most of my work was in engaging shoppers and growing their share of wallet, which provided me with a lot of opportunities to see different retailers in different industries and look at shoppers from many dimensions. I leveraged a lot of strategic thinking that happened across industries, so when I came to Safeway it was a natural transition.I've been with Safeway almost eight years now, starting in Strategy and Analytics, then taking over Customer Analytics, Pricing, and Assortment/Space Operations, including the Club Card. We were working on this opportunity to grow our one-on-one engagement with our shoppers that ended up turning into a much bigger role, which included all facets of customer loyalty.Were you always a numbers and data person?AAMIR: I've always been a numbers-oriented businessperson. Data, numbers and analytics have always been a part of me from as far back as high school. I went right into banking after my undergraduate program before I switched and moved into Procter & Gamble, a fairly data-oriented company. Then I attended the University of Chicago, a wonderful institution that connects strategy with data, and that's what I did while consulting at Kearney. Some of what attracted me to Safeway was the notion of making sure that strategies are grounded in insights and data, using that to make better decisions and measuring those decisions to make even better ones.To me, the interesting thing that connects the analytics and data part of my brain with this business, and especially Just for U, is that retailers are very rich in all kinds of data. The availability of information from millions of consumers, products and transactions that occur every day offers all kinds of possibilities for making smarter decisions that improve business and grow profits. Marketing and strategy was my background, and combined with retail, it's the best combination. I love this business. I love retail.As a data guy, heavy on the analytics and digital, do you get in the stores very often? Do you need to be in stores?AAMIR: Yes. You cannot run this business without being in stores. Data is a hobby and passion that helps me in what I'm good at, which is marketing, loyalty and growing sales. It really, really helps to be numbers oriented, but the first priority is to be consumer oriented, so I do get into stores multiple times a week. I travel with my merchandising colleagues or by myself to different regions and divisions, and I go into a lot of competitors. Whenever I am in stores I'm always intercepting customers and speaking with them about our programs and general topics. The leadership team at Safeway does that a lot so we can come back and share our collective learnings. If I hear something from a consumer that has to do with an assortment observation, I share that with the merchandising colleagues, and vice versa. To be in this business you have to be in stores all the time – that's where it all happens.How do you spend a typical day?AAMIR: My focus is to further Safeway's agenda on loyalty and shopper engagement one-to-one through loyalty. In addition to managing the Just For U program, I spend a lot of my time thinking about what the program is going to evolve into for an increasing competitive advantage going forward. The intersection of the fuel rewards program or other merchandising and marketing initiatives with loyalty and Just For U is one example.When did Just For U first start?AAMIR: The concept of Just for U was created a few years ago, though the ambition of connecting with offers one-on-one has been around for a while. Safeway has had the Club Card for more than 14 years now, and that has provided significant amounts of data that we and others in the industry have used for making better merchandising and marketing decisions. There was some direct-to-home engagement that was personalized, but until Just for U that data and connectivity with our shoppers had not been used to engage one-on-one on a regular, two-way basis. With digital, we saw the advent of the opportunity to be able to connect our Club Card shoppers with us on a regular basis. We began introducing Just For U a few years ago using a test-and-learn method. It was confined to only a few stores at first, with a website and structure that looked very different from what it is right now. Then we added tests in a few more stores in a contained environment where we could add additional marketing. Eventually we selected one of our markets as a beta market, then introduced a second beta market, did a number of enhancements, and last year completed rollout to every U.S. market.What benefits does the program offer now or enable for the future?AAMIR: The ability to find different shopper segments, or in some cases the individual household, and the ability to trigger that in an efficient, convenient and personalized manner is what differentiates this platform. The fuel rewards program is one of the strategies that can connect into this one-to-one engagement. Others include anything that we can do from a mass promotions or merchandising standpoint. If we run a promotion during a particular holiday timeframe, for example, that promotion can be personalized to a certain segment of shoppers.Just For U is a program that looks very different now than it did when we first launched it because we learned a lot, we improvised a lot and we improved a lot. It has had multiple releases and more than a hundred enhancements, and we will continue to evolve it. A few upcoming improvements I can share have to do with the other ways we can leverage one-on-one engagement with shoppers for their benefit. Just For U is a pre-shop tool, so anything that makes pre-shopping easier is where you will continue to see us making more and more enhancements. For example, the shopping list capability on our smartphone application is very popular and there are a number of possibilities that will come through that. Additionally, a number of upcoming enhancements are in the background, where we will get even more precise in our targeting.SM: What are the possibilities for CPGs?AAMIR: AAMIR: A natural fit for CPGs is new product introductions because there is a certain customer segment profile that is more likely to purchase those. We can find those segment profiles using our Club Card data and connect them with the CPGs. Targeting lapsed users is one of a host of other strategies that are also possible. These strategies have always been around and retailers, including us, have tried to implement them through methods like direct mail. But Just For U takes it to a much higher level, offering greater possibilities in a more cost-efficient manner.Retailers have so much control over information with programs like Just For U. Do CPGs still have something to bring to the table?AAMIR: Absolutely. Their research has always been useful for us, especially in terms of trends. They are always researching new trends, whether they have to do with how shoppers interact with digital media or how families are evolving. Another big trend is the ethnic makeup of the U.S. consumer and that evolution. So CPGs keep furthering their learnings and that benefits us too.From a data standpoint, are CPGs taking advantage of what Just for U has to offer? Should they be more proactive?AAMIR: It varies. Some CPGs have jumped on it in a much bigger way than others, that's no secret. The ones that have engaged in the bigger manner have done it more holistically, making Just For U part of their go-to-market strategies all the way from their brand teams to their shopper marketing teams to their retail teams. That's proven successful for them in a big way. As opposed to looking at this as a retailer tool, they've been looking at it as another way of connecting with their shoppers one-to-one. Engagement is growing as more and more participate, and there are so many possible strategies through Just For U for CPGs that there is a lot of runway left.What metric do you rely on most in terms of success for a Just For U promotion?AAMIR: Safeway has always been a very numbers-oriented organization that is heavily focused on value creation, so that finds its way into the metrics we use. We know who responded to what, what they spend and how their overall spend and basket changed in a week, in six weeks, in 12 weeks and so on. And we can measure that back down to what it took for us to make that habit change, and thus calculate the return.Has digital brought a dramatic shift in how soon you can know if a promotion was a failure or a success?AAMIR: The speed has benefited from advancements in analytics and database technology rather than just digital. A program like Just For U is made possible by advancements in a couple types of technologies. One is the database underneath it, and the ability to mine data and work with data very quickly and in a very agile manner. And the other is the shopper interface capabilities that are made possible by devices such as smartphones and tablets. Together, these two things are a winning combination. The shift is very dramatic. Several years ago when we would analyze Club Card data for a complex promotion, it would take us a day for a certain piece of analysis. Now we can do that within an hour or less, and that continues to improve exponentially.Nestled in Silicon Valley, the data talent at Safeway must be remarkable. Could Just for U have happened outside Silicon Valley?AAMIR: Being in Silicon Valley certainly helps, but Just For U really was brought to life by the teams at Safeway working together across disciplines. We have a wonderful marketing team, great loyalty team, very good IT team, fantastic retail team and very robust merchandising team. It took all five teams and their leaders coming together to create Just For U, and that is why Just For U is an integral part of our strategy and our go-to program as opposed to just another promotional initiative. The leadership of each of these individual departments coming together for a common cause is really the reason for our success. If that wasn't the case we could not have brought Just For U into market in its current shape or form in as big a manner as we have.How have you been marketing Just For U?AAMIR: We marketed Just For U primarily through our traditional means and then through digital means. Our frequency of store visits from shoppers gives us a lot of opportunities to communicate to them in-store. We also leveraged our employees to engage with shoppers and educate them about Just For U, and made it very easy to sign up in-store. We used all the available technologies; we had employees with iPads, netbooks and so on. We also leveraged some of the mass media that we use, like radio and online search.Were people skeptical about Just For U at the start?AAMIR: Whenever something is revolutionary versus evolutionary – like Just For U – the question that always comes to mind is, how big is big? And how quickly will something get big? There is no precedent, no previous adoption curve to measure, so initially that prediction was the hard part. But we never had any doubt that this would be successful, because it is the future: the pre-shop planning in grocery, the one-to-one engagement, the incremental value, the convenience and all connected to digital, mobile and the device relationships that consumers have today. It made sense that something like this would be successful. The question always was, how successful and how quickly?

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