Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis has hailed the role played by direct and digital marketing in the supermarket giant’s continued sales improvement as it posted its third consecutive quarter of sales growth.
While like-for-like sales did not exactly take off – growing 1% in the half-year to August 27 and by 0.6% in the UK – Lewis boasted: “We are winning back shoppers who may have gone elsewhere. You’ll see in the results that 200,000 more people shopped at Tesco than a year ago.”
Tesco said it had made “significant progress” in stabilising the business, despite the fact that it reported a group pre-tax profit of £71m, down 28% on the same period last year, which it blamed on one-off costs. Sales have now risen for three quarters in a row since its 2015’s annus horribilis.
And Lewis is is no doubt where the boost is coming from. He said: “If you look at some of the things on social and direct, we’ve done things in a very much more customised way. We have very much put our money into a more personalised way of communication. It is something people don’t always see as it is more targeted to the groups of customers we are trying to impact.”
Jasper Lawler from CMC Markets told the BBC: “Tesco has invested heavily in reducing prices in the last two years, and has gradually reduced its customer exodus to the discounters Aldi and Lidl.
“Both the German chains are still rapidly gaining market share but less of it is coming from Tesco, with Walmart-owned Asda notably falling out of favour.”
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