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Artificial intelligence is being used by retailers across the entire product supply chain and customer service cycle, including key areas such as pricing and promotional planning. Artificial Intelligence can determine the best price for individual items using data including seasonality, price elasticity customer product preferences and purchase histories, along with real-time inputs on inventory levels and competitive products and prices. This results in more specific discounts or marginal price increases on individual SKUs to increase demand and maximise profits. Metcash’s ALM last year announced a partnership with AI provider Complexica for standardising and optimising its promotions by using its PCM capabilities to plan and analyse campaigns, along with predicting and optimising their effectiveness.

Chris Baddock has officially taken over as CEO at Australian Liquor Marketers (ALM) after being announced as Scott Marshall’s successor back in October last year. Baddock is a well credentialed executive with more than 25 years of experience, many of those in liquor, with a background on both the supplier and retailer sides. For its September issue, National Liquor News caught up with Baddock to find out a bit more about his background and what his plans are for ALM moving forward.

NLN: Can you tell me a bit about ALM’s partnership with Complexica and how that’s progressing?

It’s exciting. We’re in phase one, and phase one is going to ensure that we optimise the promotional programming for our retailers. What it’s really doing is focusing on what the consumers are purchasing today, that will help us understand what’s emerging regarding categories. And through literally hundreds of thousands of lines of data, understand what the correct mix is for both the consumer and the retailer. So, it’s giving us the optimal mix and we’ve already scoped phase two and three. That is where artificial intelligence (AI) will help us build even more effective promotional programming.

Metcash’s liquor division, Australian Liquor Marketers (ALM), is taking its marketing to the cloud after signing an agreement with Complexica for standardising and optimising its promotional activities using Artificial Intelligence. ALM supports more than 2700 independently-owned stores operating under the IBA banner group including Cellarbrations, the Bottle-O, IGA Liquor, Thirsty Camel, and Porters Liquor.

“Following a successful proof-of-concept earlier this year, we have selected Complexica as our vendor of choice for standardising and optimising our promotional planning activities,” said interim CEO of ALM, Rod Pritchard. “Complexica’s Promotional Campaign Manager [PCM] will provide us with a cloud-based platform for automating and optimising promotional planning for more than 2700 stores, leading to improved decision-making, promotional effectiveness, and financial outcomes for our retail stores.”