UniRetail's Customer Master Data Management Program

UniRetail is a retail conglomerate operating four brands: a luxury department store, a discount chain, an online marketplace, and a grocery chain. Together they serve 45 million customers and generate $18 billion in annual revenue. The company wants to launch a unified loyalty program across all four brands, but the same customer often has separate records in each brand's system. Customer data analysis reveals an estimated 12 million duplicate customer records across the four systems. Name and address formats are inconsistent, contact preferences are contradictory (a customer opted out of email in one brand but opted in at another), and purchase histories are siloed. A customer who spends $5,000 annually across all four brands appears as four separate low-value customers. The Chief Marketing Officer projects that a unified customer view could increase cross-brand revenue by $400 million through targeted cross-selling. However, data privacy regulations require careful handling of consent and communication preferences across brands, and the four brand CIOs have competing priorities and technology stacks.