Big Red Digital has been working with SPAR Scotland, and its corporate owner CJ Lang & Son, for 20 years. In that time, we have created 3 different iterations of their corporate website, developed 4 apps for the business and integrated our Big Red Platform with their internal systems to allow retailers to control their ordering, recalls and other vital store actions on our platform.
When the Covid-19 pandemic was putting significant strain on the economy across the world, SPAR Scotland continued their significant investment in their digital transformation to create a new website for its consumers. We are all delighted with the resulting website.
Understanding the requirement
This project represented a significant move for the business, determined to make shopping with SPAR in Scotland as accessible and effortless as possible. The overarching aim was to put their customers at the forefront by encouraging and rewarding their loyalty. It was also crucial for them to expand their overall digital impact, collect and use customer data more efficiently in order to drive more targeted marketing activities.
First, Big Red's management team carried out extensive, international market research on symbol groups and some detailed UK competitor analysis that revealed new possibilities and best-practices. Then we conducted an in-depth scoping exercise with the key stakeholders at SPAR Scotland – starting at board level, and collaborating with Marketing, IT, and Trading departments. This meant that we had buy-in at all levels and a forum to share ideas from the very outset. Due to the extremely tight deadline that had to be met (to have the SPAR platform and an updated corporate website ready in just 12 weeks), weekly project meetings were held to ensure we worked in an Agile way. This approach meant that all of the key project objectives were achieved, and indeed, exceeded.
Big Red Business Platform
The website was custom-designed by our team and custom-developed using our Big Red Business Platform. By expanding and developing SPAR Scotland’s existing Big Red Platform, our developers were able to seamlessly integrate some innovative new features which will provide a quick and significant ROI for SPAR Scotland this year and ongoing.
Exclusive Features
The new SPAR Scotland website is a truly customer-centric website for all of their shoppers. It launches these industry-leading features:
- The ability to create a MySPAR account, rewarding the loyalty of all customers with unique vouchers for all registered shoppers.
- MySPAR users can create their own list of favourite products and email themselves a shopping list with these to take to a store. Registered customers can also review products to increase the user-generated content and engagement on the site.
- Exclusive competitions for MySPAR customers giving them the opportunity to win incredible products, sponsored by SPAR Scotland’s generous partners.
- An innovative Ad Management system, giving SPAR Scotland the ability to create exclusive online offers, or coordinate advertising space alongside in-store promotions. This immediately gives SPAR Scotland an additional revenue source from the website.
- An easy-to-use job recruitment system, allowing SPAR Scotland to attract the best talent into their stores, and manage the full application process in one place.
Ongoing Support & Tracking Results
The focus on investment in the business is testament to the values of SPAR Scotland. The most exciting thing is that this is just the start of the process. They are determined to use the data gathered from happy customers to further enhance the shopping experience – both online and offline. And Big Red Digital looks forward to partnering with them by using our Blended Digital Marketing Approach©.
Don’t Take Our Word For It…
"The development of our website platforms was a major initiative that we wanted to deliver during 2020. Our existing sites were no longer fit for purpose and we wanted to work with a partner who would modernise the look and feel of our sites, whilst staying true to our history and heritage.
Having worked with the team at Big Red Digital for 20 years, it was an easy decision to ask them to support us in delivering this initiative. Working to incredibly tight timescales the team at Big Red steered us through an aggressive project milestone plan which saw us launch a new consumer and corporate site on Friday 6th November.
This is only the beginning of our journey and along with Big Red, we’re excited to see where the next stage of our digital transformation takes us."
Colin McLean, CEO CJ Lang & Son and SPAR Scotland
It's been a pleasure to work with the team at CJ Lang & Son on this project and we look forward to supporting their marketing team on both powerful platforms moving forward.