JD Global Customer Insight Manager – Loyalty in Bury

Established in 1981 with a single store in the Northwest of England, the JD Group is a leading omni-channel retailer of Sports Fashion, Outdoors and Gyms with our colleagues working in stores across several retail fascias in many markets around the world. JD Sports Fashion Plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 and has been a FTSE100 publicly quoted company since 2019 and continues to grow in the UK and internationally. We want to be the leading global omnichannel retailer in the sports and outdoor industry. To be a part of this successful company and help us to achieve this you will have the desire to ingrain our strategic goals of being a people-led, innovative and customer-focused organisation which provides operational excellence whilst identifying new areas of growth as part of our day to day objectives.

Overview: JD Sports Group PLC is a leading international multi-channel retailer of sports, fashion, and outdoor brands. With an extensive portfolio of globally recognised brands, JD Sports has established itself as the 'King of Trainers' and a beacon for sportswear enthusiasts around the world. Our commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences and innovative products drives our success in the competitive retail landscape.

Position Overview: This Global Customer & Insight function is responsible for deepening JD Sports understanding of its customers, driving customer centric decision making, forecasting future customer behaviours, and supporting customer growth across all markets. This role focuses on understanding the impact of JD Sports’ loyalty programme, JD STATUS, and providing actionable insights that enable optimisation of loyalty strategy and initiatives to ultimately drive overall customer growth and retention.

Key Responsibilities:

• Loyalty Insight and Analytics
• Develop and build insights to support loyalty initiatives and the continued strategic development of the programme in support of the loyalty growth plans.
• Build segmentation frameworks and personas; define life-stage, customer profiles, behaviour clusters to inform strategy and target personalised offers to customers at the right time.
• Develop and maintain loyalty models, forecasting customer growth, earn and usage of JD Cash, provision required & the return of investment from the programme.
• Identify and create targeted audiences from the loyalty member base to support personalised campaigns.
• Responsibility for day-to-day management and usage of the Loyalty Decision Engine and managing our loyalty measurement partner (Hyperfinity) to drive value from the platform / across bespoke measurement projects.
• In collaboration with loyalty insight analyst, provide analysis of key loyalty campaigns to deliver actionable insight and improve future performance.
• Identify opportunities for the wider business to utilise loyalty data and insights and ensure these are supported where relevant (For example Group Property use of STATUS data).
• Drive the development or improvement of tools and systems (dashboards, BI platforms, data warehouses, segmentation tools) required for loyalty analytics.
• Line management responsibility for the Loyalty Insight Analyst.

Wider responsibilities:

• Keep up with market, retail, sports fashion, culture and consumer trends relevant to JD Sports.
• Identify knowledge gaps & propose new ways to capture insight, new research methodologies, or partnerships.
• Support longer-term strategic planning (e.g., 3-5 year outlooks) as well as more immediate tactical needs.
• Support regional/local teams to adapt global customer-insight frameworks to their markets and ensure relevancy.
• Work closely with other members of the Global Planning & Insight team, to create compelling data-driven outputs to provide strategic direction and decision-making, through holistic story-telling.

The ideal candidate will have:

• A minimum of 8 years’ experience in an analytics or insight-led role, either within an agency or client-side environment.
• Retail sector experience and / or working with loyalty programmes valued, but not necessary.
• A proven ability to uncover compelling insights that directly shape strategy, with examples of how you have demonstrated your influence across key areas of a business and being seen as a trusted strategic partner.
• Expertise across a range of analytical & insight tools and methodologies. You will have commercial experience using SQL and a strong understanding of customer analytics and how this can be enhanced with research or other insight tools.
• Strong project management skills, with the ability to deliver impactful work to tight deadlines. You’ll be comfortable managing multiple projects simultaneously, both independently and collaboratively.
• Experience in briefing and managing agency partners, ensuring optimal performance and return on investment. This includes day-to-day oversight, contract negotiation, providing feedback, and evaluating delivery against SLAs.
• Previous line management or leadership experience.

We know our colleagues work tirelessly to make JD Sports the success it is today and in turn, we offer them some amazing benefits including staff Discount On JD Group and other brands within the organisation and personal development opportunities to learn and develop at work.