What You Need to Know

• Accent Group’s first campaign using its new customer data platform (CDP), Amperity, hit a 100% match rate on YouTube and delivered 4x the expected ROI.
• Once a small player, Accent Group has grown into a billion-dollar powerhouse with 900 stores and 30 websites across Australia and New Zealand.
• The new CDP enables sharper digital marketing, stronger personalisation, and seamless omnichannel experiences.
• Rather than siloing customer data, Accent ensures accessibility across all teams to maximise impact.
• Successful adoption required more than tech - it needed a company-wide mindset shift to fully leverage data insights.
• A hands-on trial with Amperity highlighted its advantages over the previous CDP, securing buy-in.
• Implementation was easy; the real test was ensuring teams used the CDP to drive returns across the business.

Sometimes, the big wins come early. For Deena Colman, Group General Manager - Digital & Marketing at Accent Group, and her team at Accent the first campaign run through its new customer data platform hinted they were onto a game-changer.

“The quickest win we had was our first YouTube campaign—it hit a 100% match rate,” says Colman.  “That was incredible to see. But beyond that, the business case we built around Amperity [the CDP provider] delivered four times the initial return we were expecting.”

The biggest impact was across digital marketing.

“We saw the biggest win there because we were sending more data through to the media platforms,” Colman explains. “The more signals they have to work with, the better they deliver campaigns. That’s been a game-changer for us.”

What made the result even more compelling was how immediate it was. “We were just getting started, and the fact that we saw such a quick win just by turning it on for existing campaigns—it really highlighted the difference,” Colman says.

Growth trajectory

Fifteen years ago, Accent Group was a small player in the retail landscape—just 10 stores and $200 million in turnover. E-commerce was basically nonexistent. Fast forward to today, and the company has grown into a billion-dollar powerhouse with nearly 900 stores and 30 websites, playing a dominant role in the Australian and New Zealand retail markets.

“When I started, we were a much smaller operation,” says Colman, who has been with Accent Group throughout this transformation. “Now, we’re a public company with significant scale, but we’ve always been a bit of a quiet achiever.”

What makes Accent Group unique is its hybrid model—distributing global brands in Australia and New Zealand while also operating its own multi-brand retail formats. “We have distribution rights for some of the world’s biggest brands, but we also have our own retail formats like Platypus Shoes, Stylerunner, and The Athlete’s Foot,” Colman explains. “Through those, we sell not only our global brands but also other brands, giving us a broad and diversified retail footprint.”

Colman’s tenure also coincides with the rise of the global martech industry and the increasing primacy of data-driven marketing.

The latest key investment on that front is a new CDP.

For retailers, the conversation is always the same: drive growth, build a competitive edge, and create exceptional customer experiences. But the real challenge isn’t access to data—it’s knowing how to use it effectively, she says.

“When I first started looking at the three things - data, tools, and people - the question was, how do we fix all of it so that it works really well together?” says Colman “You’ve got to get the data and tools infrastructure right to start with. So we evaluated our tech strategy. We didn’t just want to build a tech stack that delivered world-class omnichannel experiences - which is a big part of what we stand for -but it also had to be user-friendly for our teams and provide benefits across the entire organisation.”

That meant making the system accessible to everyone, not just one team. “Because of the way we’re set up, and having experienced it in our first iteration, there was definitely a sense of - how do we make it easy for everybody? If it only lives and breathes with one team, you’re not going to generate the return on the other products you’re bringing in.”

Early on, the company recognised that its data foundations needed a complete overhaul. “For us, Amperity stood out because it’s purpose-built for retailers like us. It was quite different from the previous CDP we had on.”

Retailers can collect all the data they want, but unless they build the right infrastructure and make it work across the organisation, they’ll struggle to see real returns.

Beyond CRM: 

The goal for the second iteration wasn’t just to deliver a tool that worked for the CRM team—it had to be something bigger. “If we talk about putting the customer at the heart of everything we do, then the technology has to reflect according to Colman.

“For us, the real goals were the same ones a lot of brands are chasing: how do we increase personalised shopping moments? How do we automate campaigns seamlessly? We wanted to ensure 24/7 shopping moments happened at the right time and place, that we could pinpoint our most profitable customers, and that we could integrate new data sources effortlessly without requiring endless IT intervention.”

For retailers, having a strong market presence and a deep understanding of customer behaviour isn’t enough. It’s not just about what customers do within a single brand - it’s about how they engage across the entire portfolio. But data alone won’t set a business apart.

“With a robust CDP and the right tools in place, the next step was cultivating a culture that truly leverages those insights,” says Colman “Every business has data. Every business is trying to nail personalisation and understand the customer. But for us, the real differentiator will come down to how our people action those insights and deliver on them.”

Culture is key to unlocking value

Bringing in a Customer Data Platform (CDP) isn’t just a tech decision - it’s about embedding customer intelligence at the core of the business, she believes. “A CDP is the heart and mind of the customer. Everyone in our business touches the customer. It doesn’t just live and breathe in one team.”

That’s where culture comes in. “We were lucky - we had learnings from our first iteration, so when it came to implementation, we had the journey mapped out. A clear roadmap, a precise understanding of which data sources needed to be integrated, and most importantly, we took the time to clean the data warehouse beforehand.”

For Accent, implementing a new CDP wasn’t just about swapping out technology - it was about proving, with real-world data, that the shift would deliver tangible results.

“We worked hand in hand with our tech team because we all sit within the Central Support Team, and that was crucial to ensuring a smooth implementation,” Colman says. “The other major advantage for us was running a pilot with Amperity, using specific use cases the platform had to deliver on.”

“Doing a pilot enabled us to see our data in a different way,” she says

By running the pilot side by side with their existing CDP, the differences became clear. “I always say, you wouldn’t buy a car without test-driving it first. Amperity backed their product and put their money behind it, allowing us to test it before committing. That made a huge difference in our selection and implementation process.”

The biggest differentiator? A truly unified view of the customer across the entire brand portfolio. “They had custom out-of-the-box attributes that let us do a deep dive into customer behaviour, plus predictive models built in,” says Colman “With other CDPs, we found that required additional builds and interventions.”

With customer interactions flagged differently across multiple systems and brands, standardisation isn’t optional - it’s essential. For Colman and her team that meant ingesting data from 150 sources and transforming it into something usable.

Colman told Mi3: “The platform pulls in data from across all our brands and those multiple systems flag customer interactions in different ways. Working hand in hand with the IT team allowed us to define a consistent data model - what’s going in, how it’s structured, and the language we use when talking to the rest of the business.”

She says the result was a single source of truth that ensured customer data was clear, consistent, and actionable across the entire organisation.

Toughest challenge

For Accent rolling out a new CDP wasn’t the hard part. The real challenge came after implementation - getting teams to actually use it.

“The toughest part for us wasn’t the implementation process,” says Colman. “It was ensuring adoption afterwards - building the analytics capability and driving company-wide engagement.”

Too often, businesses treat implementation as the finish line. But for Accent success was measured differently. “You hit different sprints and hurdles throughout a project, but at the end of the day, we have a clear directive: are we driving a return on every piece of technology in our stack?” says Colman

“If our teams aren’t using it - if they’re not living and breathing it as part of their day-to-day - then it’s going to fall flat.