Catalina In the Digital Age

Catalina in the Digital Age considers how a company with a dominant market position should evolve its established product lines given the rise of novel digital technologies. Since its founding in 1983, Catalina had enjoyed a distinct position in the world of consumer promotions. Serving both retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) firms, the company's core business was distributing "cents off" coupons to shoppers via proprietary printers at checkout registers. This position allowed them to offer coupons that were "personalized" to the purchases that had just been made in the current transaction. The advent of shopper loyalty cards in the 1990s allowed them to expand that targeting to take shopper's history of purchase into account as well. In many ways, they were a successful "big data" firm well before the term became an industry buzzword.