Majid Al Futtaim, one of the Middle East's leading retail and real estate conglomerates, sought to transform their customer engagement model across their portfolio of brands and channels. Despite operating one of the region's largest loyalty programmes, their customer data was fragmented across brand silos, making personalised, cross-brand experiences technically impossible. The organisation needed a unified Customer Value Management capability that could deliver personalised experiences at scale — while meeting the stringent data privacy requirements of their operating markets.
Majid Al Futtaim operates one of the Middle East's most recognised retail and real estate portfolios, including Carrefour franchise operations, VOX Cinemas, Mall of the Emirates, and a portfolio of fashion and lifestyle brands. Despite this scale, their customer data landscape was deeply fragmented. Each brand operated its own data infrastructure, its own CRM, and its own analytics stack — creating a situation where a customer who shopped at Carrefour, watched a film at VOX, and visited Mall of the Emirates was effectively three different customers in three different systems.
This fragmentation had direct business consequences. Personalisation was limited to single-brand interactions. Cross-brand loyalty mechanics were operationally complex and technically constrained. Marketing spend was inefficient, with significant overlap in audience targeting across brands. And the organisation had no ability to understand or manage the full value of a customer relationship across their entire portfolio.
The privacy dimension added further complexity. Operating across multiple Middle Eastern markets, each with different data protection requirements, and with a customer base that included significant numbers of European nationals subject to GDPR, the programme needed to be built on a privacy-compliant foundation from day one.
MDN.digital was engaged to design and implement the end-to-end CVM programme — from data architecture and governance to personalisation capability and privacy compliance.
The first phase established the data infrastructure required to support unified customer profiles. Working with the existing technology landscape — SAP for retail operations, MS Dynamics for CRM, Google Analytics for digital behaviour, and a range of brand-specific systems — we designed a unified customer data model that could accommodate the full complexity of Majid Al Futtaim's multi-brand, multi-channel operations.
Informatica was selected as the master data management platform, providing the data quality, deduplication, and golden record management capabilities required to create reliable unified customer profiles from fragmented source systems. The integration architecture connected 24 source systems, with automated data quality checks and lineage tracking at every stage of the pipeline.
A comprehensive data governance framework was established, covering data ownership across brands, data quality standards, retention policies, and the processes required to manage customer data rights across all operating markets.
Given the complexity of the privacy landscape — multiple operating markets, European customer exposure, and the sensitivity of loyalty programme data — the privacy architecture was designed before any personalisation capability was built.
OneTrust was implemented as the consent management platform, providing a unified consent record for each customer that could be enforced across all downstream data processing activities. The consent architecture was designed to support granular consent — customers could consent to personalisation by brand, by channel, and by data type — while maintaining a single, auditable consent record.
Tealium AudienceStream was configured to enforce consent states in real-time, ensuring that customer profiles used for personalisation reflected current consent status. The integration between OneTrust and Tealium was designed to propagate consent changes within minutes, meeting the "without undue delay" requirement of applicable data protection regulations.
A Data Protection Impact Assessment was conducted for the entire programme, identifying and mitigating privacy risks before any personal data was processed through the new infrastructure.
With the data foundation and privacy architecture in place, the personalisation capability was built on top of the governed data infrastructure. Tealium AudienceStream provided the real-time customer profile and audience segmentation capability, integrating with AWS for the compute infrastructure required to process personalisation logic at scale.
The personalisation framework covered four key use cases: cross-brand offer personalisation (presenting relevant offers from across the portfolio based on individual customer preferences and behaviour), next-best-action recommendations (identifying the most relevant next engagement for each customer), churn prevention (identifying customers at risk of disengagement and triggering retention interventions), and loyalty tier management (personalising the loyalty experience based on customer value and engagement patterns).
The privacy and data governance requirements of this programme were not a constraint on the personalisation ambition — they were a strategic enabler. The consent management architecture gave customers genuine control over their data, which in turn gave the organisation confidence that their personalisation activities were legally sound and ethically defensible.
The data governance framework established clear accountability for customer data quality and privacy across all brands. Data stewards in each brand were responsible for the quality of data flowing from their systems into the unified platform. The Data Governance Office, established as part of the programme, provided oversight, policy development, and escalation support.
The combination of technical privacy controls and organisational governance created a programme that could be operated with confidence — and that could demonstrate its compliance to regulators and customers alike.
The CVM programme delivered a unified customer data platform capable of real-time personalisation across all brands and channels. The programme established the technical and organisational foundation for Majid Al Futtaim to become a genuinely data-driven, customer-centric organisation — one that can understand and manage the full value of customer relationships across their entire portfolio.
The privacy-compliant architecture has proven to be a competitive advantage in markets where customer trust is increasingly important. The ability to demonstrate transparent, consent-based data practices has strengthened customer relationships and reduced the regulatory risk associated with large-scale data processing.
MDN.digital designed and implemented a comprehensive Customer Value Management programme, establishing the data infrastructure, governance framework, and personalisation capability required to deliver unified customer experiences across Majid Al Futtaim's brand portfolio.
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