Havas Group has launched h/commerce in Australia, a new strategic advisory offering, aimed at helping brands and retailers increase sales.

The new offering delivers global, regional and local retail and shopper insights to help brands and companies navigate through pressing retail marketing challenges, with a focus on providing clients with powerful strategic and creative solutions.

h/commerce brings together retail consulting, creative, shopper, media and data experts from around the world, to create an international retail hub across Havas’ network.

Sydney will become the regional retail hub for Australia and New Zealand and is the first dedicated commerce offering to launch across Havas in APAC.

The move will bolster the Group’s current retail and shopper offering, with the current operation of BD Network evolving, with expanding responsibilities within the Sydney Havas Village.

The h/commerce team will take a holistic view of the retail environment, with services including developing shopper and data strategies, store design and execution, CRM and loyalty programmes, e, v and m-commerce and future innovation consultancy.

With access to Havas’ breadth and depth of data and expertise, the team will use analytics to study shopper behavioural dynamics and identify insights to aid smarter decision making.

h/commerce will be led by two of Australia’s leading retail experts, Simon Porter (MD) and Tom Hoskins (ECD), who both bring over 20 years’ experience in helping brands and retailers achieve greater commercial success.

In a joint statement, Porter and Hoskins said: “The likes of Amazon and Alibaba have spearheaded the rapid transformation of the global retail landscape and provoked brands and companies to re-think how they navigate it.

“We believe true competitive advantage comes from thinking like a brand but acting like a retailer – after all, retail is where brands go to face the truth from their customers.

“With h/commerce, we aspire to deliver integrated strategies and unlock creative ideas that solve business problems and ultimately help our clients achieve commercial goals and sell more product”.

Havas Group ANZ chairman Anthony Freedman said: “Launching h/commerce in Australia further extends our capabilities, towards our goal of providing end-to-end marketing solutions for clients.

“We know the retail and shopper environment has a number of nuances and complexities and the combination of our global pool of data, insights and analytics combined with specialist retail knowledge, creates a unique offering for retail clients to support their business objectives.

“Simon and Tom’s expertise speaks for itself and their growing team will continue to add a dimension to our Village offer”.

Founding clients for h/commerce include Nescafe, Supercoat, Uncle Tobys, Lurpak, Energizer and Liquor Marketing Group.

h/commerce currently operates in Belgium, Spain and France with further openings planned later this year across Europe and Asia.