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Case Study
Catalina Marketing
Premier marketing group on course with Sangoma Technologies
It’s not every day that a friendly sailing trip turns into what will eventually
become a $265 million marketing company but this is the case with St.
Petersburg-based Catalina Marketing Corporation. Back in 1983, a group of
five friends went on a sailing trip to Catalina Island, off the coast of California.
During that trip, the pooled their expertise – which included marketing, retailing
and scanning-based technology – and devised a method which would enable
manufacturers and retailers to identify customers based on actual purchase
behaviour and to then distribute purchasing incentives for competing products
right at the supermarket checkout counter.
The idea took off and today, Catalina’s marketing technology is in place at some
13,000 U.S. supermarkets and an additional 2,000 stores overseas – reaching
more consumers in an average week than the ever popular hit TV series
Seinfeld.
“We’ve been growing at an average of 20-30 per cent per annum,” says Steve
Greenfield, Executive Director, Technical R&D for Catalina Marketing
Corporation, who goes on to explain that the in-store electronic marketing
program has caught on like wildfire. “We have printers attached to the check-
out stands so when a consumer purchases a product, the system looks in the
store’s database and recognizes it as a competing or relevant brand of our
client’s and immediately generates a coupon for our client’s product.”
The reaction during the first pilot in 1984 was an average redemption rate of
eight to 14 per cent; four times that of traditional mass media methods at that
time. To date, Catalina have been responsible for billions of coupons. The
company currently provides core electronic marketing programs to more than
150 consumer goods companies in the United States alone – that’s more than
160 million American shoppers.
Using technology to drive sales
As a pioneer in the field of in-st