Ed Child, global head consumer data and digital analytics, Costa Coffee, is a prominent data leader with more than two decades of experience working at the vanguard of data and analytics across different sectors, including retail, finance and ecommerce. Through his career, Ed has made his mark for global brands including Walmart and the Coca Cola Company in the UK, and the US, giving him considerable knowledge and experience in the ever-evolving applications of data to drive business value and competitive advantage.
Ed has a proven track record building and leading teams across the whole breadth of data functions including:
Ed started his first data-centric role in GIS after completing a degree in human geography, building spatial interaction models to support location planning. He progressed to handling CRM and digital, taking on roles at retail giant Asda where he built the data and analytics team. This then developed into opportunities with the largest global retailer, Walmart, in the US, to utilise consumer data in combination with POS data where he progressed to lead Walmart’s marketing effectiveness division.
Ed was headhunted by Costa Coffee early in its data journey as the first senior strategic data lead and he began examining ways to translate the transaction-led retailer into a data-led business on a global scale. The profile of data at Costa Coffee has grown rapidly under his leadership and saw the founding of the Costa Data and Analytics Community to improve data SME communication across different brands and departments. This is further complemented by Ed’s sponsorship of learning and development initiatives within the business, including apprenticeships, partnerships with expert knowledge providers and diverse training opportunities within the organisation. This culminated in the shortlisting of the Costa Coffee team as the DataIQ Data team of the year. Ed is very engaged with the wider data and analytics community, frequently being asked to speak at different events and lead community discussions.
There is a lot that can be learned from Ed’s experiences over the last twenty years that can benefit data leaders and practitioners in all niches of industry and specialism, especially those who are seeking to achieve recognition for data in their organisations and a permanent seat at the decision-making table.
Data beginnings
Ed cut his teeth in data by joining the retail giant Asda – then a part of the Walmart family of companies – as the business was experiencing a rapid transition into the burgeoning ecommerce sector. The group was early in its data maturity journey and investing heavily in a new sector that was proving to be incredibly disruptive for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
He highlighted that “Asda in the UK was one of the pioneers in online grocery services, which created a massive source of data that a retailer like Asda had never experienced before,” said Ed. “There was little in the way of understanding the consumer, and not having benefits such as from loyalty schemes that supported the ecommerce side of the business. This has of course changed significantly in subsequent years, but at the start it was the case of consumer tracking suddenly becoming one-to-one, and there was the opportunity for additional communication and personalisation.”
Ed successfully developed a single customer view for Asda which highlighted multiple customer touchpoints and developed a single identity whether it was across online groceries or fashion. This enabled Asda to market to different customer segments in a far more accurate, relevant and personalised manner. As this ecommerce data journey was so new to the business, Ed had to navigate different challenges and seek investment in radical new business opportunities.
“One of the early major challenges was that I was one of the very first data and insight leaders that was specifically focusing on the ecommerce space,” said Ed. “The business was mature with ATL media,, but as soon as this was shifted to ecommerce there was no clear indication of where to start. My expertise really helped when it came to working with a CRM and analysing the data which rapidly became interesting to the business as online growth was evidently going to become important. Many years later this became uniquely evident during the coronavirus pandemic where online retail became the norm. But back when the journey was starting, Asda was a company with millions of people using its physical stores with a minority using the online function. It was difficult to demonstrate why investment in this space was needed and how it should be scaled to become a critical aspect of the customer experience.”
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