Leading brands like Macy’s prioritize creating meaningful, personalized customer experiences driven by data and thoughtfully orchestrated marketing decisions.
Macy’s focus centers on customer obsession, which fuels its drive for customer loyalty and sustainable growth. Marketing analytics and AI serve as the foundation for a successful marketing decisioning journey underpinned by responsible and trustworthy data and AI usage.
It all starts with a healthy dose of customer obsession
At the heart of Macy’s success is an unwavering commitment to customer obsession. Macy’s aims to be an essential part of their customers’ lives, a sentiment beautifully encapsulated by the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This beloved tradition exemplifies Macy’s dedication to creating memorable experiences that resonate deeply with their audience. As Bennett Fox-Glassman, Macy’s Senior Vice President of Customer Journey, noted, "If we think about what we want to mean to people and how important we want to be in the lives of customers, it’s an amazing aspiration for us. And we strive every day to live up to that.”
Beyond the iconic parade, Macy’s focus on the customer is evident through loyalty programs such as its Star Rewards, which has a 70% sales penetration rate. In addition, they are laser-focused on personalization.
Personalization balances relevance and context
In an era where generic marketing messages fall flat, Macy’s has embraced personalization to enhance customer engagement. By shifting from generic marketing emails to triggered, contextually relevant communications, Macy’s ensures that every interaction feels personal and meaningful. This approach not only boosts engagement but also strikes a balance between relevance and a good customer interaction – key when it comes to building long-term customer value.
And ensuring that balance starts with a solid marketing decisioning strategy. Fox-Glassman notes, “This is one of the areas where we’re really excited about the work we’re doing with SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and where we’re headed in terms of decisioning that leads to those long-term outcomes for our business.”
Cross-functional alignment centers on the customer
Macy’s recognizes that delivering exceptional customer experiences requires seamless collaboration across business and technology units. By aligning teams and incentives around shared goals of sales, profit and customer experience, Macy’s keeps the focus squarely on the customer. “Putting the customer at the center of everything we do is the easiest way to ensure that people and the alignment of our teams focus on a singular goal. And it’s just one example of the extent we go to in order to make sure we’re all aiming to improve the customer’s experience,” notes Fox-Glassman.
Good data leads to good (marketing) decisions
There’s no doubt that bad data leads to bad decisions, so Macy’s focuses on foundational investments in data quality and architecture that drive its marketing decisioning efforts. According to Fox-Glassman, it’s imperative to focus on use cases: "One piece of advice is to just be extraordinarily use-case driven. For us, that’s really focusing on what matters to our customers and their experience and prioritizing our technology and data investments against that.”
Brand trust and responsible AI are paramount
Building and maintaining brand trust is a cornerstone of Macy’s strategy. And that focus on trust permeates all facets of the organization. “We look to build brand trust at every moment and that extends to how we think about data and decisioning and other experiences customers have with us,” notes Fox-Glassman.
While Macy’s has been using AI for many years in areas like pricing and supply chain, there’s still much to learn when it comes to the responsible and widespread adoption of agentic AI tools. Although these tools are currently used more internally, there’s no doubt that this will shift in the future. “It’s inevitable to me how much these technologies will transform our business, our customer experiences and the way we work. While we’re using them more internally than externally at the moment, I expect that to shift quickly as we look ahead,” says Fox-Glassman.
