Tesco is urging suppliers and manufacturers to drive innovation in its retail offering by opening up so-called “hackathon” events, to bring people from around the grocery business together to work on new product ideas.
Speaking at the IGD online retail conference in London, Tesco’s online food marketing director Andrew Miles, claimed that one recent hackathon in Welling saw Tesco staff create an app that allowed customers to understand about healthy product alternatives in “real time”.
He said: “I’m hoping we can ask our suppliers and manufacturers to work at hackathons.”
Miles also said Clubcard was crucial for the retailer’s online shopping evolution because it allowed the company to “understand how customers are shopping through the channels and how customers are evolving”.
He cited a project that Tesco is undertaking which has seen the supermarket track the shopping behaviour of a real-life couple called since 2009 to understand how their behaviour was changing.
Miles described how the couple are now using online to adapt their shopping dynamically throughout the week as opposed to doing a weekly shop at a Tesco Extra store.
Clubcard had helped Tesco understand that today, the “shopper journey is not linear or predictive, it’s iterative”, as shoppers added and removed products from their online shopping basket throughout the week.
