Marketing

Building a community of customers

Monica Woodley

Editorial director, EMEA

Monica is editorial director for The Economist Intelligence Unit's thought leadership division in EMEA. As such, she manages a team of editors across the region who produce bespoke research programmes for a range of clients. In her five years with the Economist Group, she personally has managed research programmes for companies such as Barclays, BlackRock, State Street, BNY Mellon, Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, EY, Deloitte and PwC, on topics ranging from the impact of financial regulation, to the development of innovation ecosystems, to how consumer demand is driving retail innovation.

Monica regularly chairs and presents at Economist conferences, such as Bellwether Europe, the Insurance Summit and the Future of Banking, as well as third-party events such as the Globes Israel Business Conference, the UN Annual Forum on Business and Human Rights and the Geneva Association General Assembly. Prior to joining The Economist Group, Monica was a financial journalist specialising in wealth and asset management at the Financial Times, Euromoney and Incisive Media. She has a master’s degree in politics from Georgetown University and holds the Certificate of Financial Planning.

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Castorama, a French home-improvement chain owned by Kingfisher, has devised an innovative way of allowing its customers to benefit from each other’s expertise.  Les Trocs&;heures is a free website that allows customers to swap their DIY expertise (troc is French for barter or swap).

“Say you’re a gardener but you don’t have a clue how to lay a floor. You can swap with somebody who’s good at flooring but not much cop in the garden,” explains Ian Cheshire, group chief executive of Kingfisher. “It’s doing surprisingly well on a slow burn.” Users upload a profile including their location, availability and areas of competence. The website already has 3,500 members and has facilitated more than 1,000 swaps.

It is one of a series of peer-to-peer schemes that Kingfisher has set up. In the UK, it has launched a pilot scheme called Street Club, which aims to introduce group-buying for tools. “Think of it as a local social network with elements of Groupon and collective buying.” “We bought a web platform which we have adapted to help streets to get together to share, borrow from each other or buy equipment as a street,” he explains. “That’s been on trial this year and we’re hoping to scale up to a national roll-out.”

Thus, instead of paying £50 for a powertool that will be used once and stowed away in the shed, members will be able to pay a fraction to borrow one from an assigned neighbour whose contact details would be available on the website. “We’re trying to think differently about the retail relationship with our customers.”He adds: “All of this relies on technology that just wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago.”

Screwfix, Kingfisher&;s trade business, hosts online forums where tradesmen share tips and upload home-made instruction videos of projects they have worked on. The electricians’ area of the site alone has nearly 40,000 discussions.

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