Retailers are being offered the chance to personalise the shopping experience of individual customers by predicting ten products they are likely to buy on their next shopping trip.
The analysis is the result of a new partnership between Tesco-owned DunnHumby and predictive analytics firm Blue Yonder.
Rather than go for the obvious regular choices shoppers make, however, the scheme predicts items bought infrequently, such as washing powder or table condiments, using DunnHumby clients’ wide range of food and non-food items.
To do this, all the products bought in a six-week period prior to the shopping trip were removed from the list of eligible items for an individual customer’s purchasing forecast.
Blue Yonder’s Predictive Analytics Suite was trained to extract the individual shopping behaviour and preference from a three-year shopping history of about 100,000 loyal customers. The information was based on loyalty data.
According to Blue Yonder, personalising a customer‘s shopping trip to increase loyalty and overall basket spend has now become a key objective for most grocery retailers.
As a result, the information about which ten items customers are likely to buy on their next shopping trip is a highly valuable insight for retailers, the company said.
Promotions and individual campaigns can then be more effective, said Blue Yonder. Since a customer receiving a promotion will potentially only look at a few recommendations on the screen of a mobile device, exact targeting increases the likelihood of meeting the customer’s expectation, it said.
DunnHumby global head of digital Max Jolly said: “At DunnHumby want to continually explore new data and methods of understanding what matters to customers so we can help our clients do a better job for them. Both teams worked together well to make this challenging preliminary project a success; this successful co-operation will hopefully form the basis of a fruitful relationship between us going forward.”
