Innovative solution to optimize Carrefour’s pricing strategy

Over the past two years, inflation has put significant pressure on food and grocery retail chains to maintain margins and sales volumes.

In addition, consumer habits have changed profoundly in the wake of COVID-19. Declining customer loyalty, the resurgence of the multichannel strategy, sustainability, and the growth trajectory of neighborhood and small-format stores are just a few of the most notable trends.

In this scenario, pricing is a very sensitive issue, because it is a crucial point of contact between customers and retailers. Carrefour needed its price management process to be effective and transparent.

Carrefour chose NTT DATA’s Pricing Management solution to optimize its pricing strategy. The platform is based on an advanced rules engine and optimization algorithms that ensure the determination of the best price for each store and product based on format, geographic location, or sales channel. This solution enhances traceability and transparency, enabling Carrefour’s pricing managers and category buyers to track the process of setting each price at any time before approving its communication to individual stores.

In addition, it leverages margin targets, competitive positioning indices, and psychological pricing to drive decision-making at the item, attribute, and category levels, ensuring consistency across formats and channels. Pricing Management’s success factors are flexibility, rapid adoption, and integration within the retail ecosystem. The product can be customized to meet specific needs and also incorporates the latest regulatory updates. For example, it complies with the European Union’s Omnibus Regulation, which requires clearly displaying the previous price charged by the seller — that is, the lowest price in effect during the 30 days prior to the price reduction — during promotional campaigns.

Following the implementation of NTT DATA’s Syntphony Pricing Management solution, Carrefour achieved the following benefits:

Optimization: Supports pricing policy management across 1,300 stores and 380,000 SKUs at Carrefour Italia.

Improved competitiveness: Improves competitiveness by streamlining time-consuming processes, supporting continuous price monitoring and ensuring consistency on store shelves across different store formats (Hypermarket, Market, Express), which allows users to achieve margin and competitiveness goals independently.

Compliance with regulations: Implementation of a process to set prices for obsolete products based on the length of time the product has been on the shelf, with the goal of optimally clearing out inventory of such items.