Toys & Collectibles
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Founded in 1998, Funko is a US toys and collectibles manufacturer within the entertainment industry. With an EMEA presence spreading across 31 countries, the expansion of Funko’s product line beyond Pop! figures and a customer loyalty driven by collation and curation, data management and customer insights are unsurprisingly a priority for Funko’s Head of Ecommerce (EMEA).
Funko came to us with a whole host of data challenges underpinned by their key issue, incompatible data sources. An assorted tech stack and broad marketing channelscape resulted in various data accessibility issues and a disarray of data structures meaning it was almost impossible for the team to get a clear idea of performance and surface valuable insight. The amount of time and effort it was taking the team to pull the data sources together to get to even basic understanding meant they couldn’t justify the effort, leading to a lot of guess work and assumption making.
The team at Funko were drawn to the Data Refinery from the start, drawn by the speedy and non-invasive nature of the implementation – and the ready to go insight tools meaning minimal disruption to their day job - an answer to their problems just around the corner!
The Data Refinery team worked closely with key stakeholders at Funko to understand the key problem areas and how the features of The DataRefinery could alleviate those pains, with some common goals in mind...
We began working with Funko in February and the team were able to immediately benefit from our ready built suite of reporting & dashboard builder. Drawing on insights from their newly centralised and clean common data model, these reports enabled an instant improvement in efficiency.
After some hands-on use with the platform, we ran further training and feedback sessions to understand what else might be helpful for the team to be able to see.
There were some simple changes we were able to easily implement that could instantly impact the Funko team. A slightly more detailed view of paid marketing activity and “switching on” some additional data tables from Google Analytics to allow country level reporting are two examples.
More complex, enhanced changes were also accepted on to our feature roadmap that supported wider reporting requirements:
Product Performance: While many of our reports analyse the products and categories they sit in, Funko require a much more granular view of each product, the brand in which they sit as well as other attributes like how long they have been on shelf. Users can now break their sales performance down by various levels of the product hierarchy including category, brand, name and SKU in our dedicated product performance dashboard.
Lifetime Value Reporting: To help further understand which customers are the most valuable, the team has created a new lifetime value product, helping the business to understand how many new customers were gained in a given time period, the cost it took to acquire them and on average how much they spent in their first order as well the the proceeding twelve months. The user also has the ability to filter this data by products or brands that the customer first purchased, helping the business to see which items are driving their most valuable customer acquisition compared to the cost of acquiring them.
Funko specific segmentation: While The Data Refinery offer RFM segmentation as standard for our customers, it’s by no means the only lens used for segmentation. Funko, requested that we layer the RFM model with product purchase behaviour to create a two-part segmentation. By applying both, the business can understand what products a customer may be interested in purchasing as well as where they sit in the customer lifecycle, particularly important for responding to buying behaviours & indicators in a collectibles market. All these segments have then been passed on to our audience builder to apply to selections for more granular activation campaigns (and our report builder to allow for performance tracking).
The Data Refinery has now been implemented for 4 months and is used daily by teams in ecommerce, marketing and paid media. The impact has been widespread with insights being accessed across a range of data. Some examples include
Whilst it’s clear that the original challenge was being caused by disparate and inaccessible data sets, the real value of working with TheData Refinery is in getting easy and speedy access to the insights the whole team at Funko need to improve their outcomes. The Data Refinery is now helping to shape decision making and forecasting for Funko, one piece of data at a time.
