Retail field marketing specialist has reinvested all profits - £10 million to-date - in data and tech The UK’s largest retail field marketing specialist, Dee Set Group, is investing its profits back into the future growth of the business into cutting-edge data and tech. Having made a profit of £1.8 million in the first year of the pandemic in 2020, the group doubled profits to £3.6 million in 2021, with a profit of £4.5 million forecast for this year. Originally a logistics firm that began operations in 2001, the company naturally evolved into a more people-focused business from 2015, becoming a field marketing specialist for the retail sector. The business now focuses on helping brands to improve retail performance both in-store and online, while also working with big retailers to improve the performance of non-core categories. Based in the North West, the company utilises market-leading software that turns rich data into simple, actionable insights at speed. Dee Set’s dedicated data science team has now collected over three billion units of data, which artificial intelligence uses to deliver predictive insights to some of the UK’s best-known retailers and FMCG brands, including Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, John Lewis, Kellogg’s and Arla Foods. This supports over £4 billion in retail sales every year for the group’s clients. Dee Set complements this tech offer with the largest field sales team in the UK, employing over 4,000 people across the entire business. Such is the company’s reach that it has a retail marketing specialist based within ten miles of 97% of the UK’s retail stores. Greg Phillips, CEO of Dee Set Group, said: “We take pride in being entirely self-funded – Dee Set has never taken on any debt or gone through any funding rounds. Being privately-owned and self-funded is beneficial, as we are not beholden to shareholders or investors. In turn, this means we are a more agile organisation, and much quicker to make decisions that meet the needs of our customers. “Our approach has always been to aggressively invest profits back into the business, so that our customers are always basing their decisions on the best, most informative data. To-date, we have reinvested £10 million of profits into data and technology, with a further £7 million-worth of investment planned by 2025. “We are looking to drive digital transformation in retail field marketing, and so, our ambitions going forward are to commercialise the data stack we have collected and offer these marketing-leading insights globally. We also want to continue to grow our physical footprint in the UK organically through customer acquisitions – principally targeting major brands – and through the strategic acquisition of competitors that have failed to invest in the same market-leading technology that Dee Set Group has.” The company’s growth has resulted in the creation of 350 new job vacancies UK wide, across a variety of field sales roles including supervisors, merchandisers and warehouse fulfilment. The new job creation is a direct result of growth across retail and brands including the big four.
