Automation at Scale

Superdrug, a leading health and beauty retailer with over 700 stores across the UK and Ireland sought to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of their marketing material production and distribution. With frequent promotions, diverse product ranges, and varying store layouts, managing the creation and delivery of up-to-date marketing materials across their extensive network presents a complex logistical challenge.

The Solution:

Superdrug partnered with Rule through their relationship with ITG to implement a fully automated content production and distribution system. Rule provided a transformative solution, enabling Superdrug to:

Automate Content Decisions:  Bespoke logic within Rule's platform ingests 2-3million data points from Superdrug’s pricing and promotional data for each campaign and applies a custom set of rules to understand the content required. Rule determines the promotions, offers, materials, units of measure, currencies, promotional roundels, badges and more. Rule accounts for various special cases including region and category specific rules, ensuring that all Superdrug promotions are accurate and precisely targeted.

Generate Content at Speed: In less than a minute Rule Multiply generates 7,000 pieces of on-brand, production ready, content.

Streamline Content Review: Rule provides Superdrug's category teams with a collaborative environment where multiple users can simultaneously and in real-time: review, amend and approve generated content - with a full audit trail of all changes. The system detects and highlights anomalies where promotional data does not meet pre-agreed business rules. This streamlined workflow allows teams to efficiently manage content by combining the efficiency of automation with the accuracy of human review.

Generate Print-Ready Files: Rule generates print-ready imposed files for each of Superdrug’s stores - these store-specific files only contain the materials required by the store in an order that matches the store’s layout. Over half a million printed pages of imposed files are produced for each campaign.

The Results:

●    Faster, More Efficient Sign-Off Process: Rule has enabled a faster, more efficient, and accurate sign-off process, reducing lead times and ensuring timely campaign execution.

●    Improved Accuracy and Consistency: Automation and anomaly detection has reduced manual errors and ensures consistent brand messaging across all Superdrug stores, enhancing the customer experience.

●    Increased Efficiency: By automating previously manual and time-consuming tasks, Rule has freed up valuable time for Superdrug’s internal teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Following the success of this initial implementation over the last 18 months, Superdrug is now expanding its use of Rule for further automated content generation, including point of sale materials, shelf talkers, and pricing cards.

‍