How The North Face uses analytics to persuade people it's not just about puffy jackets

Loyalty scheme defines customers by their favourite outdoor activities

Outdoor clothing brand The North Face is best known for producing warm and waterproof jackets for skiers and other outdoors types. This is both a blessing and a problem, according to Ian Dewar, senior manager consumer lifestyle.

"It's great that customers think of us when they want a ski jacket or an insulated coat but you only buy a new jacket every five years," he explained. "We want customers to come back to us more than once a year to buy running shoes, or backpacks, or climbing kit or camping gear."

However, winter skiers are not necessarily hikers, campers or runners in the summer. Some customers do one or more activities others don't. The North Face didn't want to bombard climbers with skiing ads, or invite runners to films about rock climbing. The firm decided to segment customers into activities using a loyalty scheme, which they started in 2012. Data from sales, web searches, event registrations, competitions, surveys and other sources is analysed using Tibco Reward loyalty suite in order to build a detailed picture of each customer based on their outdoors activities.

Among the interesting insights that resulted from analysing the data was the fact that a customer's second purchase was likely to be the same item as their first: an insulated jacket buyer would return to buy another jacket of some sort. After that, though, they would tend to buy a different item.

The second item is also commonly bought for someone else. So, a fleece buyer might come back (on average nine months later) to buy another fleece for her partner.

Purchasers of backpacks commonly return to buy holdalls, Dewar said. "They like the quality of the backpack so when they are buying a bag for leisure and travelling they think of us. We found a two-to-one correlation against the general population data for this."

Dewar's team uses the Spotfire analytics and visualisation tool to spot correlations like these.

"The ideal customer is not necessarily the one who spends the most, it's the one that does the largest number of different things with the products," said Dewar. "They might use a fleece vest for running, and under a ski outfit, and they might wear it to the pub," he said.

Knowing these "nuggets of behavioural data" means The North Face is able to contact its customers with invitations to events they might be interested in, as well as targeting them with more relevant advertising.