About Us
Our Approach
Our commitment is to provide tangible value to any project. Understanding the challenges of today’s retail environment, combined with in-depth knowledge of digital marketing and integration technologies, Market Smart can bring to the table a unique perspective steeped in hands-on experience.
Our Story
Market Smart was founded in 1991 and has spawned many spin-offs over the years, all headed by the founder John Norrie. Today, Market Smart is John’s private consulting business, offering specialist services around consumer loyalty and payment programmes such as gift cards to the global retail industry.
A Virtual Team
Through Market Smart, John represents a collective of experts in the field of retail technology and marketing available to work cooperatively on any project that requires that special input and an outside view. If it is retail technology and related marketing, talk to us about your project challenges.
John A Norrie
Founder & CEO
In 1974, shortly after arriving in New Zealand John founded a small advertising agency. Over the years through various mergers and acquisitions, this agency eventually morphed into Mattingly, the largest Retail Advertising Agency in New Zealand. Through the eighties, as the PC boom took hold, it became clear to John that technology was going to become a fixture in future retail marketing, so he relinquished his role as at Mattingly to establish a technology start-up.
Market Smart launched with a mission to develop technology that linked retail point of sales systems with customer information and cross reference these data sets with advertising and promotion activity. The company achieved some very early success and was soon engaged by corporates such as Kmart and Woolworths to launch the first technology-driven retail loyalty programs in the country. This was in the days before the internet and mobile phones, so the systems relied on bulky expensive hardware and large-scale batch processing. Consumer communications were delivered by post. The late nineties heralded the paradigm shift to internet, email and mobile phones. John could see the ‘writing on the wall’ and realized that the new world order would require technology that operated and reacted in realtime.
Thus, John’s vision of the Thor system reached the market in 2003. John conceptualized the need for a platform that could receive and process data in realtime from virtually any source. Critical to this was capturing shopping basket data from retail point of sale systems (POS) and process against complex rule sets to deliver a response back to the POS as well as deliver concurrent data to other touchpoints such as mobile and web.
John’s technology vision coupled with his knowledge of retail marketing has helped drive his main operating company Tranxactor. Tranxactor boasts a portfolio of blue chip clients in UK/Europe, Australia, SE Asia and NZ.
Next Steps…
Contact Market Smart, throw us the challenge!