How Carrefour launched one of the largest Grocery Retail communities in a matter of months

Carrefour is a French multinational retail and wholesaling corporation headquartered in Massy, France.
The first Carrefour shop (not a hypermarket) opened in 1960. It is today the eighth-largest retailer in the world by revenue, it operates a chain of hypermarkets, groceries stores and convenience stores, which as of December 2021, comprises 13,894 stores in over 30 countries.

Customer-led “soft launch”

Carrefour’s strategy included a lot of the key best practices when it comes to the early stages of community-building:

• They created a private version of the community which they opened only to some of their existing communities. (ie: Facebook groups, What’s app groups, insights panels and staff members)
• They gathered insights from these first members through:
  • Direct feedback and engagement metrics from the platform V1 itself
  • Multiple surveys
  • Digital and physical round tables

They analysed all of these insights and worked with us on a V2 of the platform that fully aligned with their customers needs. Not only, did they actively work on gathering customer feedback but, when some of that feedback contradicted initial hypotheses, they adapted instead of sticking with their original ideas.

Highly visible and coordinated “hard launch”

Their customer-led strategy set clearly Carrefour’s community objectives:

• • • Empower customers to influence Carrefour’s decisions and vision.

  Provide a platform where members, brands, and Carrefour can collaborate and exchange advice to support customers’ purchasing power.

• With these customer-backed priorities in mind, Carrefour switched to a “hard launch” strategy to drive the expansion of the community on a larger scale. In fact, they coordinated the biggest community launch we’ve seen to date with:
  • A dedicated TV Ad aired during prime time
  • A dedicated survey-based contest with an easy way to participate and generous prizes
  • Additional themed-contests
  • High-visibility for these community activities on their website, app, CRM and SMS.

To sum up, key take-aways from Carrefour’s “best in class” launch are:

• A soft-launch focused on gathering customer insights to base the community on.
• A highly visible hard launch based on community activities and leveraging all brand media.

One last key point is that Carrefour organized monthly follow-up calls with all key stakeholders and relevant C-levels. This “board-level” steering committee was instrumental in aligning everyone and pushing the project forward.

In terms of next steps, after a successful launch, Carrefour’s focus is now shifting towards growing and leveraging the community within an “always-on” approach.

New events, challenges, co-creations, contests are coming up. We’re also launching an exciting sustained product testing activity to engage the community and scale product insights and UGC production for Carrefour and the brands it distributes.

• 27K active members
• An integrated reward system with Carrefour loyalty program : points will give you euros that you can spend online and instore
• 42% of unique open for each community emails
• A “Tested by the Community” label for a selection of product on Carrefour.fr
• Review generated on product page thanks to Carrefour product testing system
• Monetization thanks to contest sponsor on the community
• 3.8x Increase of average basket
• Increase of traffic on Carrefour website and app
• 213K unique visitor per month
• +27K new members per month
• 3K of top users/ambassadors detected
• Customer profiling and insights improved by community