Thinking Outside the Chocolate Box
Published 11/5/2009
Author: Bill Brohaugh
Bill Brohaugh is COLLOQUY managing editor.
Summary
To hear Mike Giresi, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President of IT for New York City-based Godiva Chocolatier, tell it, his company first embraced enterprise loyalty when the Campbell Soup Company, which had owned the Godiva brand for 44 years, sold it to Istanbul-based Yildiz Holding for $850 million in late 2007.
"We’ve always had a CRM core, but it was constrained by how our previous parents wanted us to operate," says Giresi. "Campbell’s is a CPG company, and CPG companies don’t speak to their consumer directly from a brand experience. They certainly market to them, but they sell their products to wholesalers, brokers and distributors. Our customer, on the other hand, is our real-life end user. Now we’ll have much greater transparency into what the consumer desires and needs. Just like Campbell’s would spend a great deal of time with Walmart on collaborative forecasting, we now have the same opportunity on the customer level. It’s just a different methodology and a different behavior."
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