ITG and Wickes

Leading UK DIY retailer, Wickes, was struggling to drive meaningful action and brand loyalty from its customer-facing content. Joining forces with ITG, Wickes completely transformed its approach with the Missions & Motivations Engine, leveraging data and insights to deliver a Halo of personalized content that not only unlocked significant revenue growth, but was recognized in the wider industry as a market-leading solution.

The Challenge

Wickes needed a perception shift to realize its full potential. Seen as a stop on the to-do list of a customer’s DIY job, the brand wanted to become integral to these projects, and even act as a source of inspiration. Wickes also wanted to get customers shopping from more of its extensive DIY categories, rather than sticking to only a narrow selection.

Key challenges for Wickes included:

Customers were shopping in only a limited number of Wickes’ huge array of DIY categories, resulting in limited spend and a lack of deeper engagement

They were visiting Wickes sporadically when they needed something for an in-progress project, rather than perceiving Wickes as an all-encompassing DIY solution and source of inspiration

Wickes had excellent customer data but needed support translating it into marketing insights, and ultimately relevant content that would prompt action and brand loyalty while increasing ROI

The Solution

We created the Missions & Motivations Engine — an AI machine-learning model that ingests and interprets Wickes’ customer data to generate deep marketing insights and automate personalized content at scale through our Deployteq technology, with relevance and quality guaranteed.

Rather than focusing on selling products, customer communications are now tailored based on each individual customer’s ‘mission’ (practical goals, e.g. renovating a living room or landscaping a garden). We categorized these as:

 7 TradePro missions (content designed for tradespeople)

 10 DIY and showroom missions (content designed for regular Wickes shoppers, based on purchase data)

Alongside their missions, customer motivations were broken down into three distinct groups:

 Implicit — emotional, instinctive, based on a ‘feeling’

 Explicit — logical, reasoned, ‘I need to do this’

 Aptitude — customer’s practical capability to complete a DIY project

This new strategic approach to Halo content personalization meant Wickes could more accurately segment its audience for greater content relevance, delivering value across the customer journey, while evolving from individual engagement to whole-basket recommendations.

Results and Impact

Conclusion

Wickes’ Missions & Motivations Engine showed what is possible when brands turn great data into genuine understanding of their customers, and have the capability to create quality Halo content based on those marketing insights.

We integrated Wickes’ existing data sources and tools with our own Deployteq marketing automation platform to enable content personalization at speed and scale. The Missions & Motivations Engine now a key revenue-driver and contributor to Wickes’ impressive growth, with room to grow with the brand.