Carrefour to collaborate with Meta (Facebook)

Carrefour has announced a strategic partnership with Meta (the new name of the Facebook group). Mark Zuckerberg’s company will support the French retailer during its digital transformation.

Mobile-friendly shopping

The new partnership will involve everything from internal communication over employee experiences, customer relations, digital advertising and the digitisation of brochures to social commerce. Carrefour mainly enlists the help of Facebook’s parent company to create a more mobile-friendly environment for those browsing and shopping on their smartphones. The supermarket group will also work with WhatsApp and Messenger. Managers of local stores will be able to advertise locally online through various Facebook channels, such as Instagram.

Carrefour’s brochures are also moving online: the intention is to launch a ‘shoppable’ e-brochure on WhatsApp, as 70 % of French people say they would prefer digital brochures to the paper ones – at least, according to a survey commissioned by Meta. Even Carrefour Links, the French retailer’s own media and advertising platform, will be enhance by Meta. With the help of the social networking specialist, the retailer should learn to target and measure campaigns better.

Carrefour’s 320,000 employees will switch to Workplace as their corporate communication tool. Workplace will gradually be introduced throughout the company, including in Belgium. “The goal is to enable employees to build communities and use familiar social networking features in their daily work life, to better communicate with each other”, the companies say. “Regardless of their position within the group, their business units or the country in which they are based.” Training employees through virtual reality is also a possibility.

Also collaborating with Google

The collaboration comes at a time when Facebook is under fire due to concerns regarding the company’s large social impact. Critics say that, as a media channel, the company is partly responsible for political polarisation, disinformation, and inciting hatred. That is possibly why founder Zuckerberg is now focusing on B2B partnerships and other channels, away from the purely social network role.

Carrefour, on the other hand, is keen to work with major tech partners to digitise faster. Since 2018, it has established a strategic partnership with Google, including a joint digital hub in Paris to work on innovations related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Recently, the company also announced it is migrating to Google’s data cloud.

With these actions, Carrefour hopes to help realise its digital ambitions. The French hypermarket giant wants to triple its online turnover and thus become the world leader in e-commerce. In the coming years, the company will invest three billion euros in projects aimed at digitisation, such as this one involving Meta.