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Clemenger Group fuses Raydar and Clemenger Shop

Only two years after launch, Clemenger Shop has been merged with the Clemenger Group’s other shopper marketing business, Raydar.   

This move will see Clemenger Shop’s staff of six leave the Colenso office and join the 25 employees at Raydar to form a consolidated team, effective 1 July.

In its initial two years, Clemenger Shop has worked closely with the team at Colenso, stepping in when shopper-marketing services were required. 

“They are now working across five or six of Colenso clients and they’ve just been chipping away at business,” says Clemenger Group chief executive Jim Moser. “They’ve worked those clients very well and really provided a through-the-line service to many of them, covering everything from shopper marketing through to consumer advertising.” 

Last year, when Clemenger Shop was officially unveiled, general manager Troy Fuller told StopPress that the agency employed ten people. And while the company will only be shifting six people across to Raydar, Fuller says that this isn’t because Clemenger Shop has had to make staff cuts.  

“We haven’t let anyone go,” says Fuller. “We have five full-time employees plus one fixed term and one contractor in Sydney. When we last spoke we had additional freelancers plus a grad, which is where the figure of ten would have come from.”

Moser also points out that Clemenger Shop has turned a profit in a very short space of time.  

“A start-up generally takes three or four years before you start making any money, but these guys have breaking even or making a small profit since they started … They’ve grown to the stage where they can easily afford to employ the staff they have and then contract out the rest of the work to Raydar or Colenso and still make money.” 

As illustrated by the example of .99, Colenso has previously been successful at incubating businesses and then moving them out of the office to stand independently. And Moser says that it was always part of the plan to shift Clemenger Shop away from College Hill eventually.    

“I always had in the back of my mind that depending on how big they got and how developed they got that we would them out of Colenso and set them up either separately or merge them with another Clemenger Group company,” Moser says.  

He says that Raydar was the obvious choice for the merger, because its shopper marketing services complement those offered by Clemenger Shop.

“Clemenger Shop is focused on customer insights and the research side whereas Raydar is very much into the creative and execution,” Moser says. “And so when we were looking at these two businesses, we thought ‘why don’t we merge them now, instead of waiting a few more years for Clemenger Shop?’” 

From the outset, Clemenger Shop general manager Troy Fuller said that his organisation’s major point of difference lay in the team’s interest in data.       
  
“We try to go a little further than that and try to understand the shoppers in terms of what they think, say and do,” Fuller previously told StopPress. “It’s about developing insights on how shoppers behave. And that gives us a base to move into shopper activation.”

And at a time when clients want additional insights on the effectiveness of their campaigns, these capabilities will come as an advantage to the team at Raydar.

Raydar founder Darryl McClay will lead the new venture as chief executive while Fuller will take up the position of managing director. 

The agencies will continue trade under their current brands in the interim, but the team is currently considering a new combined identity and an office shift is also on the cards later in the year.   

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