Sainsbury's to boost data driven marketing at last

Some two decades after Tesco launched Clubcard – and 13 years since it ditched its own Reward Card – Sainsbury’s has decided that building a single customer view could be quite a good idea after all.
Speaking at the analyst event for Sainsbury’s interim results, chief executive Mike Coupe said the supermarket will start its bid to get a more detailed view of its customers, but not until next year.
Coupe claims the move will “step us on again in the way that we personalise interactions with our customers.”
He added: “We already think that we have a lot of customer knowledge and that we use that in a variety of different ways. But actually the next stage of the programme is to have what we would call a single customer view of our customers where we pull together all of our datasets to enable us to anticipate and fulfil our customers’ needs on a more personalised basis.”
Like Tesco, though, it is focusing on other areas, too; better in-store experience; clothing and merchandise and strategic partnerships through concessions and click and collect. “It’s about how do we utilise our space and make our superstores a more attractive place to shop in the future,” said Coupe.
Over the past year Sainsbury’s marketing efforts have been more low key, with an eye on the cost of competing in the supermarket price wars and food deflation. Even so, the firm has reported an 18% slide in profits, hit by lower sales and the price war. It posted a profit before tax and one-off items of £308m for the 28 weeks to 26 September. The figure is the supermarket’s lowest first-half profit since 2010 and down from £375m reported a year earlier.
Sainsbury’s has been part of the Nectar loyalty scheme since 2002, when it was formed by merging the loyalty programmes of Sainsbury’s, BP and Barclaycard, and including Debenhams which did not have an existing scheme.
Nectar now claims to have over 18 million people signed up to the scheme, with 14 member companies and over 500 online retailers.

TOPICS:Sainsbury's Tesco Clubcard