How Mecca takes advantage of viral moments to connect with customers

As beauty brands go viral on social media platforms, Australian beauty retailer Mecca uses those moments to its advantage to capture customer data. 

At the Salesforce World Tour Essentials in Melbourne, Dominic O'Halloran, head of data and analytics at Mecca explained to attendees how they use those viral moments to understand their customers better.

“One of the things that we're using analytics for as to when that [viral moment] happens to understand who those customers are, what drives them, and what are they interested in,” he explained.

“When they come into Mecca, we can give them that experience and show them all the other brands and products we have to offer. We are trying to really capture that viral growth that can happen.”

To connect with customers and continue to grow the business Mecca leverages data and analytics at scale. O’Halloran explained why Mecca has a large demand for data.

“Everyone is always on the lookout for ways that they can grow their part of the business more. How do they deepen customer experiences and provide new experiences to customers? How they build the brands that our customers love,” he said.

One of the challenges O’Halloran currently faces is to right-size its data and its data team to meet the need of the business.

“We are a much bigger business now than we were back then, so we need to make that fit,” he explained.

Data governance

Another challenge that comes with large-scale growth is data governance, O’Halloran explained.

“Because we've grown so fast, so quickly, and everyone was so desperate for data and sometimes there have been shortcuts that get taken in development,” he said.  

“Now we're playing catch up with some of those things. But that's exactly why it's important to have good foundational governance initiatives.”

O’Halloran said Mecca has several data governance initiatives which he said have changed the way the company delivers work for the business.

“One example here is we have a data architecture governance forum, and we use this to help analysts and engineers work to best practices and standards,” he said.

“We're always discussing patterns and the right ways of doing things, what's best practice, how do we ensure what we're building is scalable, long-lasting and we're not duplicating on effort.”

Athina Mallis travelled to Salesforce World Tour Essentials in Melbourne as a guest of Salesforce.