What Marston’s Teaches Us About Customer Data and Modern ERP

Great food, a good pint, and a familiar welcome—that’s the promise Marston’s has been making for nearly 200 years across more than 1,500 pubs in the UK. It sounds simple, but anyone who’s run a multi-location business knows it isn’t. Delivering a consistent experience at that scale takes more than friendly staff. It takes data, and more importantly, a way to actually use that data.

That’s the part most companies still struggle with—and it’s why the Marston’s story, even a few years on, remains a useful lens for thinking about ERP and customer systems today.

The problem Marston’s set out to solve

Marston’s wasn’t short on customer data. Like most modern operators, they were collecting it everywhere: loyalty signups, booking platforms, Wi-Fi logins, point-of-sale systems, email campaigns, social channels, survey tools. The information existed. It just lived in a dozen different places, owned by a dozen different teams, and none of it added up to a single, clear picture of the guest walking through the door.

So they did what a lot of organizations are now doing: they brought it together. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Marston’s unified those scattered sources into one profile per customer—then put that profile in front of marketing, operations, and the teams designing the next visit.

Why this still matters in 2025

The Marston’s case study is a few years old, but the underlying challenge has only intensified. Talk to any CFO or COO today and you’ll hear some version of the same complaint: we have more data than ever, and less clarity than we’d like.

A few things have changed since Marston’s first told this story:

The ERP conversation has shifted. It used to be about finance and inventory. Now it’s about whether your ERP can play nicely with the CRM, the data platform, the AI tools, and the operational systems that actually drive revenue.
Customer data platforms are no longer optional. What Marston’s did with Customer Insights is now table stakes for any consumer-facing business. The question isn’t whether to unify data—it’s how to do it without creating yet another silo.
AI changed the stakes. Copilot, predictive models, and agent-based automation are only as good as the data underneath them. Clean, connected customer and operational data is the prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.
Legacy ERP is showing its age. Systems built for an on-prem, transaction-first world struggle to feed the real-time, cross-functional decisions leaders need to make today.

What finance and operations leaders should take from this

You don’t have to run a pub chain to see yourself in Marston’s situation. Manufacturers, distributors, healthcare providers, and professional services firms all face the same core question: can we see our customer—and our business—as a single, coherent picture?

A few things worth thinking about as you evaluate your own stack:

Start with the decisions, not the software. What questions can’t your leadership team answer today? Which ones cost you money or customers when you get them wrong? That’s where the integration work should focus first.
Treat ERP as the spine, not the whole skeleton. Your financial system needs to connect cleanly to the platforms running operations, customer engagement, and analytics. If those handoffs are painful, the rest of the stack suffers.
Don’t underestimate the change management. Marston’s success wasn’t just a technology win—it was getting people across the business to trust and use the same view of the customer. That part rarely shows up in the demo.
Plan for AI before you need it. Whatever decisions you make about ERP and customer data over the next year will determine how much value you can get out of AI in the three years after that.

The bottom line

Marston’s didn’t transform itself by buying a piece of software. It transformed itself by deciding that scattered data was costing them the customer experience they wanted to deliver—and then aligning their systems around fixing that. The tools have evolved since, but the lesson hasn’t.

If you’re working through similar questions about your ERP strategy, your operational platforms, or how your financial systems fit alongside the rest of the business, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we have with clients every day. Talk to eIS Business Solutions about where your stack is helping—and where it’s quietly holding you back.